OH, WHAT A TANGLED WEB.

Abstract

One of the greatest scientific challenges that nature poses is to understand how the world is put together. How do billions of cells combine to form a living, breathing human being? How does a seed grow into a giant tree? Puzzles such as this have intrigued and frustrated scientists for hundreds of years. The central question is perhaps best captured in the famous saying: “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” A tree is more than just a heap of cells. A forest is more than just trees, and an ant colony is more than just thousands of individual ants. All of these systems are organised. The whole emerges out of interactions between many individual parts. But just how does that organisation occur? This is the challenge that complexity theory seeks to answer.