The Complex World

<p><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>The Complex World</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)> originally published in Volume 1 of </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Foundational Papers in Complexity Science</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)> presents an entirely new framing of nature of the human role in the natural and technological worlds and what it means to prosper on a living planet.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>We live in a complex world-meaning one that is increasingly connected evolving technological volatile and potentially poised for catastrophe. And yet we continue to treat the world as if it were simple: linear unchanging disconnected and infinitely exploitable.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Complexity science is an approach to understanding and surviving in a complex world. In this concise and comprehensive introduction Santa Fe Institute President David C. Krakauer traces the roots of complexity science back to the nineteenth-century science of machines-evolved and engineered-into the twentieth-century science of emergent systems.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>By combining insights from evolution computation nonlinear dynamics and statistical physics complexity science provides the first scientific framework for understanding the purposeful universe.</span></p>