This was a very interesting book and undid almost all of the reductionism at the heart of David Eagleman's book, Incognito. This is an interest of mine that's endured a few years now and I continue to seek ways through understanding what I consider a very exciting area of science.
The idea that properties emerge from complex populations following relatively simple sets of rules (I have called this Axiomatic Systems in my own work modelling financial decision making in markets) seems so intuitively obvious to me that I sometimes forget just how mysterious and hard to grasp it is. I'm far from gripping the implications of network theory, complexity and emergent behaviour but I think the whole field has some fascinating possibilities.
For instance the idea that our metabolic structure exists in 4 dimensions not the three that we experience - we are creatures of four dimensional packing. Now that is very cool. It also hints at the really deep complexity of nature and that a reductionist approach, whilst eminently useful for many things, is not going to get us to a comprehensive understanding of what we're made of and how the world works.
Anyway, Mitchell does a very good job surveying the landscape of complexity theory, from game theory, to Turing machines, to ant colonies and immune systems. It's a very interesting and inspiring tour of the major areas of research and exploration. It made me wish that I'd known about this when I was a proper scientist - it might have changed the course of my life.
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