Self-Organization and Adaptation in Complex Systems

Abstract Eighteenth-century science, following the Newtonian revolution, has been characterized as developing the sciences of organized simplicity, nineteenth-century science, via statistical mechanics, as focusing on disorganized complexity, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century science as confronting organized complexity. Nowhere is this confrontation so stark as in biology. Nowhere are new conceptual tools so deeply needed. In this chapter, I describe some of those tools.