This Research Is "Complex".

• Author: Barton, Erin
• Position: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - Complex adaptive systems

THE STATEMENT that "I can calculate the movement of stars, but not the madness of men," has been attributed to Sir Isaac Newton. "What Newton was saying was that I understand complicated phenomena--physics--but I can't understand complexity," explains David Krakauer, president of the Santa Fe Institute.

When birds fly together in a flock, they seem to move as one--a great serpent in the sky, twisting about as if controlled by one brain. Then again, aren't individual humans made up of a vast number of cells, each with its own life? Maybe that flock in the sky is a serpent of sorts, and all the birds are its "cells." Perhaps people are cells in the "organism" of a city.

The science of understanding such systems of interdependent parts is aptly named "complexity." The field is young, highly interdisciplinary by necessity, and so cutting-edge it often is off the edge of the map, but many of the challenges we face today involve complexity.

What is complexity? The Santa Fe Institute, an independent research and education center that addresses complex problems, defines it as "the evolved order inherent in the living world." This order occurs in "ubiquitous patterns that repeat throughout living nature: networks, conflict, and cooperation, distributed decisionmaking, the structured flow of energy, and elements of invention and novelty. These patterns are found at all scales, from the molecular, through tissues, individuals, technology, the economy, and cultures."

In 2015, Arizona State University and the Santa Fe Institute launched the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems to advance understanding of problems that stretch across complex systems. It is one of four centers under the umbrella of ASU's Biosocial Complexity Initiative. The others are the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity (CSDC); the Mathematical, Computational, and Modeling Sciences Center; and the Center for Behavior, Institutions, and the Environment.

Michael Barton, director of CSDC, likes to use the metaphor of a watch when introducing the concept of complex systems (CS). "If you dismantle [a watch] and study the parts separately, it would be very difficult to understand what it does or how it does it," says Barton, professor of anthropology in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

The pieces of a watch working together and creating a timepiece is an example of emergence, just like cells creating higher-order life forms. An emergent system cannot be broken...