The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity on a Complex World

An accessible foray for general readers through and beyond chaos and complexity theory offers a readable survey of the history of science, clearly showing how recent discoveries have changed established assumptions about reality. 15,000 first printing. $15,000 ad/promo.

One step onto this ontological escalator with British biologist Cohen and British mathematician Stewart ( Does God Play Dice? ) and readers will zoom right to the metaphysical floor, where science displays its most basic assumptions. In the last 10 years, scientific thought has been marked by frequent paradigm shifts--from classical laws to chaos theory and complexity. In the first half of this book, the authors attempt to review the quantum world for general readers, an effort that is frequently undercut by their playful approach, e.g., a conversation about the organization of development between Augusta Ada, Lord Byron's daughter and "a founding figure in computer science," and Wallace Lupert, a fictitious modern biologist. Moving on to examine the basis for a belief in simplicity, they introduce two new concepts: simplexity and complicity. The former refers to the tendency of a simpler order to emerge from complexity, the latter is a kind of interaction between coevolving systems that supports a tendency toward complexity. The authors, hoping to challenge orthodoxy and to stimulate thought, confound rather than clarify.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.

First there was chaos theory, best described in James Gleick's Chaos: The Making of a New Science ( LJ 8/87); then came complexity theory, the subject of Roger Lewin's Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos ( LJ 9/1/92). Perhaps the next inevitable unifying theory of science to emerge is simplicity. Whereas the former two schools of thought seek philosophical congruences between divergent trends in modern science, simplicity, as conceived by Cohen and Stewart (a reproductive biologist and a mathematician, respectively), goes farther to examine the underlying physical reasons why these unities exist. This is a cleverly written, whirlwind tour of science that stretches the mind and, in a few places, strains credulity. Still, the authors freely admit that they are being speculative, and they invite their readers to accompany them upon their intellectual journey. Mind benders like this book usually appeal to a rather small but fanatical readership. Mid-sized public and undergraduate libraries should consider it.
- Gregg Sapp, Montana State Univ. Libs., Bozeman
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The ironic title doesn't announce the end of whirls, eddies, and physical uncertainty but

rather the end of a scientific outlook: reductionism. Cohen and Stewart explain their objections to it but concede that reducing behavior to the interactions of the smallest entity has brought forth great advances in biology, chemistry, and physics. They believe, however, that its potential is exhausted and here propound their iconoclastic ideas for thinking about complexity. Both are populists--Cohen is a British TV commentator on biology, Stewart a Scientific American columnist on math--and so write in a practiced idiom for nonexperts. They go so far as to write sf-like interludes from the planet Zarathustra to illustrate the tricks that reductionism plays on perception. But in the main, they proffer myriad examples, drawn mainly from biology, purporting to convince readers that "bottom-up" views are ultimately spurious (for example, the popular notion that DNA is a "blueprint" for every detail of life) and should be replaced by concepts of "simplexity" and "complicity." It seems rather easier to follow a single atom around than the features and systems the authors throw out, but it is such rebels who keep honest the prevailing epistemology of science. Gilbert Taylor