Weaver argued that science up through the 1800s had concerned itself with questions of “organized simplicity”: problems involving one or two variables, like the attraction between two magnets or the rotation of the Earth around the sun.* But, Weaver observed, this was not the way much of the real world worked. Living organisms, for instance, “are more likely to present situations in which a half-dozen, or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously, and in subtly interconnected ways.” Such traits, he noted, are found in ecosystems, economies, and political systems. In other
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