2008-2009 Basic and Clinical Science Course: Section 9: Intraocular Inflammation and Uveitis... Book

What can I say about this book? Complexity is one of my favorite topics - the world is made of individual agents reacting to limited local factors, and their interaction produces sophisticated emergent systems. Awesome.

And this book manages to make it seem like a boring administrative task.

Maybe I'm coming to this book too late. I've been seeing the world through complexity-colored glasses for years, so this book seemed plodding. Dull. No matter the discipline, Waldrop barely manages to capture the basics of complex systems. Maybe they were a difficult, new topic when this book was written in 1992. Maybe the ideas of the Santa Fe institute (WTF? Who cares?) have already managed to permeate all of academia enough to make it seem stupid. But I doubt it. More likely, this guy was trying to make a story out of an understanding that most scientific disciplines already have.

This book is not an exploration of ideas: it's a history of academia - of one institute that apparently lays claim to the idea of emergence, and the old White guys who think they're revolutionary by thinking about it.

Ugh, a pet peeve - Waldrop seems to think that the order of complex systems is somehow antithetical to evolution. Where did you come up with this nonsense? It's a huge revelation for him when someone comes close to reconciling them. The awesome thing about emergent systems is that the complexity comes about through evolution at the individual level! Have you even been listening?

Anyway. Search Google for emergence, emergent systems, complex adaptive systems, flocking or schooling behavior, evolutionary algorithms, cellular automata, neural networks, self-organizing systems, or PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING ELSE REALLY COOL, and you'll get a better idea of complexity than this book would give you.