M. Mitchell Waldrop

For that matter, why do humans spend so much time and effort organizing themselves into families, tribes, communities, nations, and societies of all types?

This is a book about the science of complexity—a subject that’s still so new and so wide-ranging that nobody knows quite how to define it, or even where its boundaries lie. But then, that’s the whole point.

If evolution (or free-market capitalism) is really just a matter of the survival of the fittest, then why should it ever produce anything other than ruthless competition among individuals

In a world where nice guys all too often finish last, why should there be any such thing as trust or cooperation? And why, in spite of everything, do trust and cooperation not only exist but flourish

Is the incredibly precise organization that we find in living creatures really just the result of random evolutionary accidents

What is life, anyway? Is it nothing more than a particularly complicated kind of carbon chemistry? Or is it something more subtle

What is a mind? How does a three-pound lump of ordinary matter, the brain, give rise to such ineffable qualities as feeling, thought, purpose, and awareness

And perhaps most fundamentally, why is there something rather than nothing? The universe started out from the formless miasma of the Big Bang. And ever since then it’s been governed by an inexorable tendency toward disorder, dissolution, and decay, as described by the second law of thermodynamics. Yet the universe has also managed to bring forth structure on every scale: galaxies, stars, planets, bacteria, plants, animals, and brains. How? Is the cosmic compulsion for disorder matched by an equally powerful compulsion for order, structure, and organization? And if so, how can both processes be going on at once

every one of these questions refers to a system that is complex, in the sense that a great many independent agents are interacting with each other in a great many ways. Think

In every case, moreover, the very richness of these interactions allows the system as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization