Chaos and Life
eBook - PDF
Available until 27 Jan |Learn more

Chaos and Life

Complexity and Order in Evolution and Thought

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
Available until 27 Jan |Learn more

Chaos and Life

Complexity and Order in Evolution and Thought

About this book

Why, in a scientific age, do people routinely turn to astrologers, mediums, cultists, and every kind of irrational practitioner rather than to science to meet their spiritual needs? The answer, according to Richard J. Bird, is that science, especially biology, has embraced a view of life that renders meaningless the coincidences, serendipities, and other seemingly significant occurrences that fill people's everyday existence.

Evolutionary biology rests on the assumption that although events are fundamentally random, some are selected because they are better adapted than others to the surrounding world. This book proposes an alternative view of evolving complexity. Bird argues that randomness means not disorder but infinite order. Complexity arises not from many random events of natural selection (although these are not unimportant) but from the "playing out" of chaotic systems—which are best described mathematically. When we properly understand the complex interplay of chaos and life, Bird contends, we will see that many events that appear random are actually the outcome of order.

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Yes, you can access Chaos and Life by Richard J. Bird in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Biological Sciences & Biology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Table of Contents
  2. Preface
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Prologue: The Dawn of Man?
  5. 1. Iteration and Sequence
  6. 2. The Crisis in Biology
  7. 3. The Origin of "Species"
  8. 4. Chaos and Dimensionality
  9. 5. Chaostability
  10. 6. The Geometry of Life
  11. 7. The Living Computer
  12. 8. Morphology and Evolution
  13. 9. Entropy, Information, and Randomness
  14. 10. The Effectiveness of Mathematics
  15. 11. Life and Conflict
  16. 12. The World as Iteration and Recursion
  17. Notes
  18. Index