Next: A first look at complexity
Up: Table of contents

Complexity is not 'a' science. It is the shape which sciences assume after self-organizing along their natural internal connections that cut across the traditional disciplinary boundaries. Its objects of study are adaptive collective entities emerging in one discipline (at a coarse space-time scale) as the result of simpler interactions of elementary components belonging to another discipline (at a finer scale).

Because Complexity does not fall within the pigeon hole of one single discipline, one is often tempted to define it as yet another pigeon hole. This is both too much and too little: it is too much because complexity does not have as usual disciplines have a well defined area of responsibility. It is too little because in its maximalistic form, complexity claims or at lest strives to address a very wide and increasing range of phenomena in all science.

In fact, in each science there are basic laws and objects that form the elementary concepts of that science. Usually, to obtain a complexity problem it is enough to ask about the mechanisms and (finer scale) objects generating those basic laws and objects. The reason for it is that if the emergence of the basic objects of a science were easy to explain, that science wouldn't have been constituted as an independent science to start with. Indeed, it would rather be treated by the scientists just as a (relatively trivial) branch of the science that explains its fundamental objects and laws. The sciences owe their very existence equally to 2 contradictory facts:

• the relative ease to identify and characterize their basic elements and interactions
• the complexity of explaining them.

It is this tension that lead to the 'decision' of founding independent sciences: Sciences, that deal with the well defined basic objects and their postulated properties while renouncing to explain those objects in terms of a finer level.

Of course this introduces the necessity for postulating those basic properties which in the end might turn out to be true only at various degrees (like the 'indivisibility' of atoms or the Darwinian characterization of evolution or the identity of social groups as such).

The singular times at which those postulates become accessible for study, challenge, validation / falsification are the periods of scientific upheaval and of great developments: the discoveries on the structure of atoms, the discovery of the chemical basis of genetics (from the double helix on), and hopefully – one day - the discovery of the laws explaining the emergence of social behavior or of intelligence.

It is at those times that considering complex phenomena becomes unavoidable and the pressure is strong enough to re-evaluate and overthrow the initial decision (which underlined the very establishment of the subject as an independent discipline) of taking the basic entities and their properties as granted. Overthrowing the very basics of a science is of course likely to encounter a lot of fear and hostility among the rank and file and among the leaders of the 'threatened' field. This is an enough reason for some of the scientists in the target discipline to become hostile to the complexity 'attack'.

Much of the present Complexity work may be thought as an application (with appropriate adjustments) of the table proposed 30 years ago by Anderson [2] in the paper where he defined Complexity as 'More Is Different'. In this table, the 'simpler' science appears in the second column and the 'more complex one' (whose basic rules are to be deduced from the 'simpler one') - in the first:

But complexity is not offering just a way of answering questions from one science using concepts from another. By suggesting similar concepts and methods in connecting the 'simpler' to the 'more complex' science in each pair (each row) in the table, it is promoting a new (agent / network - based) 'universal', unifying scientific language. This new language allows the formulation of novel – not conceivable until now- new questions. This implies a new research grammar which allows novel interrogative forms. As such, it requires the growth of a new generation of scientists mastering this interdisciplinary universal grammar.  Thus complexity is not a juxtaposition of various expertises. It is rather an intimate fusion of knowledge, a coordinated shift in the very objectives, scope and ethos of the affected disciplines.

Consequently, it encounters fierce resistance from distinguished scientists that see themselves bona-fide defending the old identity of their disciplines. To avoid conflict, complexity should be given its own space and support rather then expecting that complexity projects will be supported by the departments whose very identity they are challenging (or sending complexity projects to beg or steal resources from them.

Complexity induces a new relation between theoretical / 'academic' science and 'applied' science. Rather then applying new hardware devices (results of experimental research) to physical reality, complexity applies new theoretical concepts (self-organization, self- adaptation emergence) to real but not necessarily material objects: social and economic change, individual and collective creativity, information flow that underlies life etc. Thus, much of the applications of Complexity are of a new brand: "Theoretical Applied Science" and should be recognized as such in order to evaluate their full expected practical impact.

Next: A first look at complexity
Up: Table of contents