Signs Of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology

by Ricard Solé, Brian Goodwin

Signs of Life is an entirely new approach to the problems of understanding living systems. It applies the mathematics of order and disorder, of entropy, chance, and randomness, of chaos and nonlinear dynamics to the various mysteries of the living world at all levels. Less a set of answers than a guide to thinking about living systems, this book will help set the agenda for biology in the coming century.

Genres: Science, Biology, Nonfiction, Popular Science, Mathematics

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Mangoo · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book provides a survey of the state of complex systems studies by the end of the 90's, and is particularly influenced by the Santa Fe Institute view and research. Reading it 15 years after its publication, it gives the impression that at the time it could have been one of the best overview books on the subject matter, and it still provides a good introduction. It stands out for having two layers of readibility, as the text is punctuated with rather technical description of models bounded by boxes. The content is organized through chapters that progressively grow in reach, starting from discussions of instabilities and critical phenomena and self-organization and emergence in physical systems and then looking for them in larger and larger systems, such as brains, ant colonies, ecosystems, financial markets and civilizations. The affilitation to the SFI is clear if only for the extended use of agent-based models (particular in their lattice implementation, which is akin to cellular automata) all over the place, and the attitude of jumping quite rapidly (at least in the text) from some experimental evidence to admittedly oversimplified models that in any case seems to show universal traits of the phenomena described - though the universality of such traits appears as a given. One can understand that such systems are hard to disentangle, yet the at times perceivedly forceful reduction of this complexity to abstract models appears arbitrary when not thoroughly confronted with data - so much for the "vanilla flavor" taste of some of these researches when compared to other branches of science. Nonetheless, the authors provide ample commentaries on many fundamental and general points, such as emergence, contingency and path dependency, criticality and cascades, fluctuations and information flows. Remarkably, this book was published when small-world and scale-free topologies of networks were just being discovered. Overall, a good standpoint for the time, and a still decent introduction to complexity.

[Samuel Peck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elucidates a very intriguing and interesting subject (the dynamics of complex systems as seen in biology and also everywhere else e.g. earthquakes, cities and financial markets), but not the easiest of reads.

For more accessible (and updated) books on the subject, recommend the following instead:
-Emergence by Steven Johnson
-Ubiquity by Mark Buchanan
-Scale by Geoffrey West

And for the implications for economics and financial markets:
-The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker
-Adaptive Markets by Andrew Lo
-The Misbehaviour of Markets by Mandelbrot

[Manuel Pita · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must for anybody who studies complexity with an interest in e.g. computational/systems biology. A revised version could make the insights more accessible to readers coming from different disciplines.

[Enrique Oviedo · Rating 4 out of 5]

El libro nos acerca al mundo de la complejidad de manera muy gráfica y didáctica con ejemplos claros y fáciles de seguir. El único pero es que junto a capítulos bien llevados y reveladores, hay otros donde la especulación es tanta que resta un poco de rigor al conjunto. En cualquier caso, muy recomendable.

[Guillermo A]

Hay fractales hasta en el tráfico