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When we began to explore complexity nearly two decades ago, books on complexity and the social sciences or policy could be counted on two hands. With the growth of studies in complexity, you would now need rows of bookcases. To save groaning shelves, this chapter provides a short history of complexity and related concepts. It does not summarise the long history of complexity thinking throughout human history, at least since Heraclitus 2,500 years ago, nor does it critically review all the different interpretations of complexity that have arisen over time. Instead, we want briefly to explore the emergence of complexity out of the earlier ordered framework and examine its roots in the physical and biological sciences. We then trace the impact of the ordered framework on the social sciences, noting that, despite its influence, the social sciences continually harboured challenges to this framework. For the reader familiar with complexity this chapter can be ignored or skimmed.1 However, for our new students, future policy partners and those who are just beginning their complexity journey, we strongly encourage you to take the time to see where complexity emerged before jumping into the more applied chapters. Even after two decades, it remains an amazing field to explore and continues to offers new insights into the world around us.
The roots of order
Before we begin to explore complexity, it is necessary briefly to explore why the pursuit of order is so rooted in the recent Western intellectual tradition and why complexity is such a challenge to this orderly framework. Though we could go back much further in time and to other continents, we will start at the Enlightenment, an astounding time for Europe where it became the centre of intellectual, scientific and economic transformations that would reshape the world. Though hundreds of actors played their part, Rene Descartes (1596â1650) and, slightly later, Sir Isaac Newton (1642â1727) set the scene. The former advocated rationalism while the latter unearthed a wondrous collection of fundamental physical laws. A flood of other discoveries in diverse fields such as magnetism, electricity, astronomy and chemistry soon followed, injecting a heightened sense of confidence in the power of reason to tackle any situation. The growing sense of human achievement led the famous author and scientist Alexander Pope to poeticise, âNature, and Natureâs laws lay hid in night. God said Let Newton be! And all was light.â2 Later, the 18th-century French scientist and author of Celestial Mechanics, Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749â1827), carried the underlying determinism of the Newtonian framework to its logical conclusion by asserting that, âif at one time, we knew the positions and motion of all the particles in the universe, then we could calculate their behaviour at any other time, in the past or future.â
The subsequent phenomenal success of the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, which was based on this new scientific approach, led to a confidence in the power of human reason to tackle any physical situation. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many scientists believed that few surprises remained to be discovered. For the American Nobel Laureate, Albert Michelson (1852â1931), âthe future truths of Physical Science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimalsâ (Horgan 1996: 19),3 implying that physicists were now only filling in the small cracks in human knowledge. More fundamentally, the assumption and expectation was that, over time, the orderly nature of all phenomena would eventually be revealed to the human mind.
To simplify drastically, the paradigm of order was founded on four rules:
- Causality: given causes lead to known effects at all times and places.
- Reductionism: the behaviour of a system can be understood, clockwork fashion, by observing the behaviour of its parts. There are no hidden surprises; the whole is the sum of the parts, no more and no less.
- Predictability: once system behaviour is defined in a model, the future course of events can be predicted by application of the appropriate inputs to the model.
- Determinism: processes flow along orderly and predictable paths that have clear beginnings and rational ends.
Given these rules, several expectations emerged:
- As human knowledge inevitably increases, phenomena that appeared to arise from disorder will be recognised as ordered.
- Knowledge enables us to reveal the underlying order. Hence, greater knowledge equals greater order.
- With greater knowledge and order, humans increasingly can predict and control more and more phenomena.
- Potentially, with ultimate complete knowledge, humans will see the order of the universe and be able to control everything.
With ultimate complete knowledge, humans will see the order of the universe and be able to control it. The orderly framework worked remarkably well and was conspicuous by incredible leaps in technological, scientific and industrial achievements. Science became orderly and hierarchical with clear divisions that manifested themselves in the departmentalised evolution of modern universities. Not surprisingly, success in these areas had a profound effect on attitudes in all sectors of human activity, spreading well beyond the disciplines that made the original discoveries. It even created the ordered âplayâ of the US National Football League described in the Introduction.
Spreading ripples of doubt
Certainty and predictability for all, the hallmarks of an orderly frame of mind, were too good to last. Fissures had existed for some time; even Isaac Newton and Chris-tiaan Huygens in the 17th century couldnât agree on something as fundamental as the nature of light (is it a particle or a wave?). These difficulties bubbled under the surface of acceptable scientific discourse and the expanding university arenas. In some cases, they were seen as unimportant phenomena that would be resolved by the next wave of fundamental laws. However, by the early 20th century, they could no longer be ignored. The physicist Henri PoincarĂ© (1854â1912) was one of the first to voice disquiet about some contemporary scientific beliefs. He advanced ideas that predated chaos theory by some 70 years (Coveney and Highfield 1995: 169). Later, Einsteinâs theory of general relativity published in 1915; Niels Bohrâs contribution to quantum mechanics (Nobel Prize in 1922); Erwin Schrödingerâs quantum measurement problem and Paul Diracâs work on quantum field theory, for which they shared a Nobel Prize in 1933 and Werner Heisenbergâs matrix mechanics and uncertainty principle (that won him a Nobel Prize in 1932) all played a decisive role in pushing beyond the Newtonian limits that had enclosed it centuries before. These ideas sowed doubt that the universe was orderly and began a process that has begun to transform attitudes in many other disciplines.4
Essentially, they revealed that not all phenomena were orderly, reducible, predictable or determined. What this meant was that, even at the most fundamental level, some phenomena do conform to the classical framework, but others do not. With this, the boundaries of the classical paradigm were breached. Gravity continued to function, and linear mechanics continued to work, but the ordered classical framework could no longer claim to be universally applicable to all physical phenomena. It had to live alongside phenomena and theories that were essentially probabilistic and that do not conform to the four golden rules associated with linearity: order, reductionism, predictability and determinism. Causes and effects are not fully linked; the whole is not simply the sum of the parts. Taking the system apart does not reveal much about its behaviour, and the related processes do not steer the systems to inevitable and distinct ends.
Given these nonlinear phenomena and nonadherence to the golden rules of order, new expectations were necessary for this expanding paradigm:
- Over time, human knowledge may increase, but phenomena will not necessarily shift from the disorderly to the orderly.
- Knowledge does not always equal order. Greater knowledge may mean the increasing recognition of the limits of order and knowledge.
- Greater knowledge does not necessarily impart greater prediction and control. It also may indicate increasing limitations to prediction and control.
- There may not be a universal structure or endpoint to phenomena and knowledge.
The shift in scientific analysis from utter certainty to considerations of probability was not accepted lightly. Schrodinger had originally designed his cat thought experiment as a way of eliminating the observed duality problem in which a quantum system appeared to exist in multiple states!5 The sea change radiated slowly outwards from quantum mechanicsâ domain of subatomic particles such that uncertainty, unpredictability, holism (parts cannot be separated from the whole which they comprise) and probability were increasingly recognised as an inevitable feature of many phenomena and situations. In effect, the envelope of orderly science was expanded to add unordered complex phenomena, also known as complex systems, to those already in place.
Complexity in the physical sciences
Once the door was open to probability and uncertainty, a new wave of scientists began studying phenomena that had previously been ignored or considered secondary or uninteresting. These were previously considered, as by Nobel prize winner Ernst Rutherford, as mere âstamp-collectingâ activities. Weather patterns, fluid dynamics and Boolean networks were just three of the areas that saw the growing acceptance of nonlinear complex phenomena and systems.6 One of the most well-known examples was the work of Edward Lorenz and his famous âbutterfly effectâ (Lorenz 1972). Following Lorenzâs work and the work of many others, the path that leads from cause to effect becomes hidden, order is no longer certain and chaos and complexity are an integral part of physical phenomena. Moreover, phenomena could not be reduced and isolated but had to be understood only as part of whole systems and through holistic perspectives.7
Other common examples of complex systems in everyday life are found in simple forms of fluid dynamics. For example, the water molecules creating a vortex in your bathtub are a type of physical complex system. The molecules self-organise and form a stable complex system so long as the water lasts in the bathtub. The vortex is easy to recreate, but the exact combination of water molecules that made the specific vortex is impossible to reconstruct. Each vortex, though similar, is not an exact copy of the other. The Lorenzian Waterwheel, a simple waterwheel that exhibits orderly and chaotic motion merely by manipulating the flow of water, is another classic case (Gleick 1987: 27).
Work in this area led to the creation of a variety of definitions of complex systems. In the physical world, these systems are described as being complex because they have numerous internal elements, dynamic because their global behaviour is governed by local interactions between the elements and dissipative because they have to consume energy to maintain stable global patterns. Physical complex systems obey fundamental physical laws but not in the same way as ordered systems. For example, the second law of thermodynamics states that, when a system is left alone, it becomes increasingly disordered; only the application of energy can maintain order in the system. The effects of the second law are plain to see. A deserted building, for instance, eventually turns into a pile of rubble. After a few centuries, even the rubble may disappear without a trace. Ultimately, a system cut off from the outside world will fall into a deathly state of equilibrium in which no further change can occur. For the complexity physicist Peter Allen, orderly equilibrium systems are âdeadâ systems (Allen 2001).8 For example, a ball bearing inside a bowl quickly settles at the bottom, and that is that: it is âdead.â
Complexity, by contrast, is exhibited by systems that are far from equilibrium. In this instance, the system has to draw energy from and dissipate waste into other systems in order to avoid falling into the destructive clutches of the second law of thermodynamics. As we will be exploring later, the most dramatic illustration of that process is planet Earth. Without th...
