A Crude Look at the Whole: The Science of Complex Systems in Business, Life, and Society

Economist Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems) lucidly explains his academic specialty, which seeks to identify the general principles by which the individual elements of systems, behaving independently, interact to achieve complex adaptive solutions to various environmental challenges. Miller contrasts this approach with traditional disciplines that reductively examine only individual elements, such as studying single neurons instead of the entire brain. Using examples of systems as different as beehives and economic markets, the book demonstrates how the repeated, decentralized application of simple algorithms can produce sophisticated solutions for organisms or groups. Miller shows how concepts such as data feedback loops, population heterogeneity, and social networks are relevant to his theories and describes how game theory, computer modeling, and modern statistical methods reveal the elegance and power of complex adaptive systems. He concludes that their appearance in widely varying contexts suggests an underlying “deeper unification among systems”—for example, that “a honeybee swarm may just be a more easily observed instance of a brain.” Not every reader will be convinced by these broader assertions, but Miller does provide a thought-provoking introduction to the study of complexity. (Jan.)