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

by M. Mitchell Waldrop

the very act of filling one niche opens up more niches—for new parasites, for new predators and prey, for new symbiotic partners. So new opportunities are always being created by the system. And that, in turn, means that it’s essentially meaningless to talk about a complex adaptive system being in equilibrium: the system can never get there. It is always unfolding, always in transition. In fact, if the system ever does reach equilibrium, it isn’t just stable. It’s dead. And by the same token, said Holland, there’s no point in imagining that the agents in the system can ever “optimize” their fitness, or their utility, or whatever. The space of possibilities is too vast; they have no practical way of finding the optimum. The most they can ever do is to change and improve themselves relative to what the other agents are doing. In short, complex adaptive systems are characterized by perpetual novelty.