Review | Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos

The complexity of human language is one of the most distinctive characteristics of our species. In nature we can find multiple examples of collective intelligence and social interaction, but it was syntactic communication and semantic diversity that led us to the anthropocene. Thanks to language we have the capacity to store and transmit knowledge, that network of information that began with mysticism and polymathy has evolved to the present day in the Internet, a computerized avalanche to which we are all connected and where our opinions and ideas concur. The immense theoretical and empirical conglomeration that humanity has retained, brought with it the desire to unify the different conceptual niches that over time have been built, reaching its maximum expression in modern paradigms such as cybernetics, the general theory of systems or the standard model of particle physics.

The birth of artificial intelligence and the exponential development of dynamical systems theory led to the widespread use of words such as self-organization, feedback and emergence throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It was not until 1984 that the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) was founded in New Mexico, a research center dedicated to understanding the fundamental principles of complex systems at scales ranging from cell biology to human societies, drawing on fields as diverse as physics, biology, linguistics, computer science, economics and political science. Today it is still difficult to define precisely what a complex system is, but in a nutshell it is any architecture composed of a considerable number of components that interact in a non-linear way with each other, whose ability to adapt and evolve allows it to optimize energy expenditure and information processing, acquiring a critical state in its dynamics. The history of complexity thus results in an intricate flow of perspectives that, despite the turbulence, converge in the understanding and resolution of the deepest mysteries of the universe.

In his book, Roger Lewin offers us an unorthodox discourse on complexity. In contrast to the conventional scientific dissemination writings—themed on complexity—usually consumed by enthusiastic beginners, this work opens the doors to the study of complex systems through a debate of reasoning and conflicting points of view. Through nine chapters, the author presents numerous reflections made by different scholars who have been key to the creation and progress of complexity science. Being grounded in dialectic, the dichotomy between science communication and scientific research fades away and, having a non-linear plot structure, the reader has the freedom to go through the text as he/she pleases. Thus, Lewin not only introduces the key concepts in this field of study—such as self-organizing criticality, positive feedback and emergent properties—but also sketches the history of complexity, from its origin to its early development.

In the first two chapters we discover the analogies between genetic crossing and cultural propagation made by the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who was one of the co-founders of the SFI. We will also learn about the criteria of Stuart Kauffman and John Maynard Smith in analyzing the complexity of life; the former is a theoretical biologist who is credited with the invention of random Boolean networks, a mathematical tool used to observe chromosomal interactions; the latter was one of the most important geneticists in Europe, whose main contribution was to apply game theory to study various archetypes in evolutionary biology. In chapters three and four the author immerses us in the limit of chaos, which refers to a balance between change and stability, an optimal equilibrium between order and chaos. Lewin tells us how this dynamic state was later baptized by Per Bak with the name of self-organized criticality; he also tells us how Christopher Langton was a pioneer in exploring this dynamic regime, which can be found in almost any natural structure and/or social architecture.

From the fifth to the seventh chapter, the author mentions some of the aspects of complexity research that caused a stir at the time, and consequently, caused a slight stagnation in the growth of the field. The first of these was artificial life, which in its early years was branded as science fiction. In this way we are introduced to the research of Thomas S. Ray, an ecologist whose interest in self-replicating programs led him to embark on the world of programming, which finally led to the Tierra project, one of the most representative simulations of artificial life in the last century. Perhaps one of the most controversial works was that of James Lovelock, whose Gaia hypothesis received both support from brilliant minds such as Lynn Margulis and rejection by renowned scientists such as Richard Dawkins. In his conjecture, Lovelock proposes a kind of bottom-up causality, which makes it possible for life to modify the physical and chemical environment in which it develops. This dragged with it a kind of vitalism that put Lovelock’s career on the ropes and is currently an idea that is not very well accepted by the community. Lewin also addresses the non-existence of an absolute definition of complexity, a problem that exists to this day.

The eighth chapter turned out to be my favorite, since it discusses the notion of emergence and takes as its main axis one of the enigmas that has most amazed me since childhood: the mind-body problem. Hand in hand with a group of philosophers, mathematicians and neuroscientists of the highest caliber—such as Patricia Churchland, Daniel Dennett, Danny Hillis, Roger Penrose and Nicholas Humphrey—the writer takes us on a journey between the border of two worlds: on the one hand, the monistic perspective is discussed, in which the mind is nothing more than an emergent property of the interaction between our neurons, and on the other, the dualistic arguments are analyzed, from which it is derived that consciousness per se goes beyond physical reality, the latter without the need to contradict the reductionism that prevails in science. The collision of both positions allows us to glimpse that the paradigm of complexity is a bridge between both pillars of knowledge, giving a glimmer of hope to all those passionate about the subject who seek an answer to this unknown.

Following the concept of emergence, in the ninth chapter Roger culminates his writing by addressing another of the scientific and philosophical controversies that coexist in the twenty-first century, that is, the origin and meaning of life. Moreover, in this last part Roger interweaves a skepticism towards the archetypes that complexity offers us, because although it is true that this area has brought with it a great advance in unifying disciplines that, in principle, seemed disjointed, it is likely that we are facing one of the many mirages that humanity has formulated in the course of its history. Perhaps the people who will take us from the proto to the meta have not yet been born, but at the end of his journey Lewin makes it clear that although we are still facing an incomplete theory, complexity science is the first belief system to reach a sufficient level of formality to elucidate the fervent and inextricable landscape that nature offers us, using the scientific method.