Complexity Theory

The Origins

Before the current wave of interest in complexity and complex systems that constitutes the core of this work, there have been two previous waves of interest in complexity and complex systems. The first wave took place in Europe after World War I, giving birth to the term holism and to interest in gestalt theories. Holism regards natural objects as wholes that are not entirely resolvable into parts, that are more than the sum of their parts, and the mechanical act of putting together their parts will not produce them or account for their characters and behavior. Applied to complex systems, holism postulates new properties and relationships among subsystems that had no place in the system components: hence it calls for emergence.

The second wave can be tracked to during and just after World War II with the emergence of cybernetics and general systems theory. Cybernetics focused on the coordination, regulation, and control of systems by feedback loops. Cybernetics had two key drivers: (1) the search for a goal (or standard) oriented toward a particular objective, and (2) the need for adaptation to the environment. These drivers allowed the use of strategic planning to define the plan to get the goal, to set the control systems, and to use (negative) feedback systems to adapt to changes in the environment to keep the system moving toward the goal.