Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Indeed, thought Holland, that's what this business of "emergence" was all about: building blocks at one level combining into new building blocks at a higher level. It seemed to be one of the fundamental organizing principles of the world. It certainly seemed to appear in every complex, adaptive system that you looked at. But why? This hierarchical, building-block structure of things is as commonplace as air. It's so widespread that we never think much about it. But when you do think about it, it cries out for an explanation: Why is the world structured this way? Well, there are actually any number of reasons. Computer programmers are taught to break things up into subroutines because small, simple problems are easier to solve than big, messy problems; it's simply the ancient principle of divide and conquer. Large creatures such as whales and redwoods are made of trillions of tiny cells because the cells came first; when large plants and animals first appeared on Earth some 570 million years ago, it was obviously easier for natural selection to bring together the single-celled creatures that already existed than to build big new blobs of protoplasm from scratch. General Motors is organized into several zillion divisions and subdivisions because the CEO doesn't want to have half a million employees reporting to him directly; there aren't enough hours in the day. In fact, as Herbert Simon had pointed out in the 1940s and 1950s in his studies of business organizations, a well-...