Joss Colchester wrote an article titled The Rise Of Complexity.
« The reductionist approach has both its achievements and failures, out of it we have created a sophisticated and powerful body of knowledge that is one of humanities greatest achievements. But also by breaking things down and focusing on the parts it systematically de-promotes the relations between these parts and the different levels of organization that can emerge out of them. » « Both differentiation and integration are required for a pattern of organization to persist over time but of course, the two are pulling in different directions and it is this tension between integration and differentiation that is the core of complexity and it is out of the interplay between the two that we get the process of evolution. »
« “Systems that are too simple are static and those that are too active are chaotic, and thus it is only on the edge between these two behaviors where a system can undertake productive activity. In its most grand incarnation, the edge of chaos captures the essence of all interesting adaptive systems as they evolve to this boundary between stable order and unstable chaos” – John H. Miller, Scott E. Page [authors of Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life] »
Articles of Interest 