内容简介

In a rented convent in Santa Fe, a revolution has been brewing. The activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics such as Murray Gell-Mann and Kenneth Arrow, and pony-tailed graduate students, mathematicians, and computer scientists down from Los Alamos. They've formed an iconoclastic think tank called the Santa Fe Institute, and their radical idea is to create a new science called complexity. These mavericks from academe share a deep impatience with the kind of linear, reductionist thinking that has dominated science since the time of Newton. Instead, they are gathering novel ideas about interconnectedness, coevolution, chaos, structure, and order - and they're forging them into an entirely new, unified way of thinking about nature, human social behavior, life, and the universe itself. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell - and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today. They want to know why ancient ecosystems often remained stable for millions of years, only to vanish in a geological instant - and what such events have to do with the sudden collapse of Soviet communism in the late 1980s. They want to know why the economy can behave in unpredictable ways that economists can't explain - and how the random process of Darwinian natural selection managed to produce such wonderfully intricate structures as the eye and the kidney. Above all, they want to know how the universe manages to bring forth complex structures such as galaxies, stars, planets, bacteria, plants, animals, and brains. There are commonthreads in all of these queries, and these Santa Fe scientists seek to understand them. Complexity is their story: the messy, funny, human story of how science really happens. Here is the tale of Brian Arthur, the Belfast-born economist who stubbornly pushed his theories of economic ch

精彩摘录

你要保持尽可能多的选择。你选择的是生存能力和可行的方案，而不是所谓的“最优化”。许多人都会对此发问：“这样你不就选择了较次的方案里嘛？”不，你没有。因为利益最大化不再是一个界定的很清楚的定义了。你要做的是在前途未卜的世界上变得更强健、更有生存能力。而这反过来又会使你尽可能多的了解非线性关系和偶然因素的作用。你极其小心谨慎地观察这个世界，不期望目前的状况会永远不变。

——引自第469页

列文丁说，有两种科学家。第一种科学家把世界基本看上去是均衡的。如果有某种不合时宜的力量在某一时刻将整个系统略微推离了均衡点，他们会感到，从通盘来说，这个系统仍然会回归到均衡点上来。列文丁把持这种观点的科学家叫做“柏拉图派”，因为柏拉图这位雅典哲学家曾声称，我们周遭这个混沌而不尽完善的世界不过是尽善尽美的“原型”的各种影像而已。而第二种类型的科学家则把世界看做一个流动和变化的过程，看做同种物质以无穷无尽的不同组合不断循环往复。列文丁把这些科学家称为“赫拉克利特派”，因为赫拉克利特这位爱奥尼亚哲学家曾热烈而诗意的认定，这个世界处于流动的、不断变化的状态之中。比柏拉图几乎早一个世界的赫氏因观察到“你踏入同一条河，但流过的却是不同的水流”著称。他的这句话被柏拉图意解为：“一个人无法两次踏入同一条河流。”

——引自第470页