Within months they were talking about the institute’s program being not just complex systems, but complex adaptive systems. And Holland’s personal intellectual agenda—to understand the intertwining processes of emergence and adaptation—essentially became the agenda of the institute as a whole. He was accordingly given star billing at one of the institute’s first attempts at a large-scale meeting, the Complex Adaptive Systems workshop organized in August 1986 by Jack Cowan and Stanford biologist Marc Feldman.
