The Collapse of Chaos (Penguin Science) - Softcover

Jack Cohen; Ian Stewart

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140246754 ISBN 13: 9780140246759

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd, 1995

Synopsis

Science's traditional answers to the question: "How does complexity arise in nature?" are given at the beginning of this book. It shows how intelligence and human culture can be traced back to atomic structure, reducing the whole of nature to simple laws of fundamental physics. However, the book then proceeds to show that "How does complexity arise?" is really the wrong question. It proposes that a more interesting question is "Why do simple structures exist at all?". Scientific reductionism is useful but does not give the whole truth: it tells how but not why; it looks at insides but not outsides, content but not context. The subject-matter of traditional science is re-examined from a different viewpoint, focusing on the ability of complicated rules to generate simple behaviour, through the "collapse of chaos".

About this title

About the Author

Jack Cohen is an internationally known reproductive biologist. Ian Stewart is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick.

From Kirkus Reviews

Riding the wave of popularizations of chaos and complexity theory is this new contender by a pair of English science writers, Cohen, a biologist, and Stewart, a mathematician. Rather than enthuse about the C words, they ask another question: If the universe is chaotic, where do the simplicities of nature come from? Then they proceed, for fully half the book, to lay out the current reductionist paradigm by which cosmology, culture, evolution, intelligence, etc., are the consequences of lower level ``simpler'' principles: quantum mechanics, chemistry, the genetic code. That done--and done quite well despite a style that is sometime too breezy by half--they spend the rest of the book pointing to the inadequacies of reductionism and building toward two explanatory principles which they call simplexity and complicity. Simplexity is ``the emergence of large-scale simplicities as direct consequences of rules,'' e.g., the patterns that emerge in John Horton Conway's computer game of life; and by extension, any features that emerge from sets of similar ground rules. Complicity is more like convergent evolution: different sets of rules generating similar features (e.g., bat wings versus bird wings). Either principle brings about a collapse of chaos. Basically, what they are saying is that you can't simply map a lower level of organization, say, the DNA code, into a living organism. There is instead a dynamic in which content and context are critical. The argument is fine. However, had the authors avoided cutesy neologisms, visits to another planet, and other textural distractions, their many useful examples and well-taken points might have been even better taken. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0140246754
• ISBN 13: 9780140246759
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 512