COMPLEXITY REFERENCES

BOOKS
(Click on the highlighted blue title for an extended review.)

Abram, David. 1997. The Spell of the sensuous. New York: Random House. (Abram employs ideas from phenomenology, ecology, and anthropology, as well as his own extensive travels through rural Asia, to explore the participatory connection between indigenous cultures and the "more-than-human," sensuous, natural world. He shows how this important connection, which provides the ultimate grounding for all our perception, language, and rationality, has been denied in modern Western culture, adevelopment linked to language and phonetic alphabets. Provocatively, Abram's text demonstrates the limitations of inter-subjective discourses that deny any considerations of the more-than-human world.)

Baars, Bernard, J. 1997. In the theatre of consciousness: The workspace of the mind. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. (In this short book, Baars utilizes the metaphor of the "theatre" to explore how consciousness creates access to the vast and varied knowledge sources in the brain. Baars describes consciousness as a "publicity organ" that acts as a facility for "accessing, disseminating, and exchanging information, and for exercising global coordination and control" (p. 7). Notably, the appendix of this book provides for an intriguing analysis of "conscious versus unconscious" facts, which provocatively invite the reader to "design a theory that fits.")

Barabási, Albert-László. 2003. Linked. New York: Plume Books. (Barabási wrote Linked to spread the word about “how everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science, and everyday life.” This general audience book is a find for beginner and seasoned complexivists, alike, as Barabási adroitly describes his own journey toward understanding the interplay of nodes, hubs, and scale-free models in the formation of networks.)

Bloom, Howard. 2000. Global brain: The evolution of mass mind from the Big Bang to the 21 st century. New York: John Wiley & Sons. (Drawing on recent trans-disciplinary research into complex adaptive systems, Bloom develops his assertion that "We are neurons of this planet's interspecies mind" (p. 223). The text is more an application than an explication of complexity principles, but nevertheless provides a powerful demonstration of the usefulness of much expanded interpretations of "cognition" and "mind.")

Brockman, John, ed. 1995. The third culture: Beyond the scientific revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster. (This edited collection brings together leading thinkers in information science, evolutionary theory, cosmology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. Authors were invited to comment on one another's contributions, in the process foregrounding important breaks and confluences in the strands of inquiry that gave rise to current complexity discourses.)

Buchanan, Mark. 2000. Ubiquity: The science of history ... or why the world is simpler than we think. London, UK: Phoenix. (Buchanan looks at patterns of distribution of wars, forest fires, epidemics, earthquakes, money markets, and other complex phenomena in an attempt to foreground that such events obey "power laws," not normal curves. The implication is that centuries of research into such phenomena has been oriented by an inappropriate assumption about how they are distributed--an assertion that may have tremendous implications for research in the social sciences.)

Cajete, Gregory. 2000. Native science: Natural laws of interdependence.
Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers. (In this thought provoking text, Cajete uses complexivist understandings to contrast a holistic and relational Native scientific worldview to a traditional Western analytic and linear science methodology. Cajete develops his analysis to explore the embededness of time, place, culture, language, and ecology within Native understandings to propose foundational principles for the creation of a re/newed Native scientific paradigm.)

Capra, Fritjof. 2002. The hidden connections: Integrating the biological, cognitive and social dimensions of life into a science of sustainability. Toronto, ON: Doubleday. (Capra takes his perspectives on complexity science and deep ecology into the social sciences with this engaging text. He outlines a conceptual framework for sustainability and applies it to key issues of the early twenty first century. The importance of this book lies in Capra's efforts to make complexivist principles accessible and relevant to the daily lives of a mainstream audience.)

Capra, Fritjof. 1996. The web of life: A new scientific understanding of living systems. New York: Anchor Books. (An insightful and concise book that presents a nicely varied overview of emergent scientific theories that have significantly influenced and shaped the field of complexity science. An excellent introduction for anyone new to the field.)

Cilliers, Paul. 1998. Complexity and postmodernism: Understanding complex systems. London, Routledge. (In this text Cilliers provides a helpful introduction in understanding complexity theory and the characteristics of complex systems. Cillers insightfully shows how complexity can reframe our classical understandings of language and mind, as he integrates key poststructuralist insights on re-presentation from the works of Saussure and Derrida.)

Cohen, Jack, and Ian Stewart. 1994. The collapse of chaos: Discovering simplicity in a complex world. New York: Penguin. (Biologist Cohen and mathematician Stewart explicate established principles while anticipating the possibilities for complexity research. The text provides a major contribution in the recombination of the terms complexity and simplicity to generate the notions of complicity and simplexity --which they use to press attentions toward ethical issues in projects of knowledge production. These insightful perspectives have important implications for readers interested in exploring complex understandings of the mind and learning.)

Damasio, Antonio. 1999. The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. New York: Harcourt Inc. (Damasio's experiences as a neurologist lead him to investigate the roots or core levels of consciousness as a biological and emergent series of adaptations that evolved in response to complex and ever-changing environments. In a thought-provoking style, Damasio argues that the power of consciousness comes from the connection between the biological machinery of life regulation and the biological machinery of thought.)

Deacon, Terrance. 1997. The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language
and the brain. New York: W. W. Norton. (Neuroscience and evolutionary anthropology provide the theoretical foundations for Deacon's challenging and dense text. Deacon presents language as a complex and symbolic system that self organizes for maximum replication and reproduction. This self-organizing and evolutionary system of language co-evolved with the brain to form a unique system of communication, which propelled human evolution into its present state. Deacon's arguments provide for a sophisticated, interesting, and provocative read.)

De Waal, Frans, B. M. and Peter L. Tyack (Eds.). 2003. Animal social complexity: Intelligence, culture, and individualized societies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (De Waal and Tyack present an edited collection of essays that explore thee influence of social complexity on the emergence of intelligence. Through biological studies of various animals, from birds to sperm whales, the contributors provide insights into how intelligence and culture might have emerged and co-evolved in individualized societies.)

Diamond, Jared. 1997. Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies. New York: W.W. Norton. (In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Diamond argues that societies developed differently on different continents because of differences in continental environments, not in human biology. His account is informed by recent developments in genetics, molecular biology, linguistics, epidemiology, archaeology, and other domains. Although he does not explicitly invoke complexity science principles, he treats the geopolitical landscape as an emergent phenomenon and ends his text with a proposal for "a science of human history" that is clearly complex in character.)

Dimitrov, Vladimir and Hodge, Bob. 2002. Social fuzziology: Study of fuzziness
of social complexity. Germany: Springer-Verlag. (The authors bring together perspectives from science, mathematics, semiotics, and the social sciences to develop the concept of social fuzziology to describe “the dynamic complexity of human existence in the social world.” Over the span of seven diverse chapters the authors develop their understanding of social fuzziology to encompass a different form of transcendent logic characterized by uncertainty, ambiguity, indeterminacy, and obscurity that permeates our daily experiences and being.)

Donald, Merlin. 2001. A mind so rare: The evolution of human consciousness. New York: W. W. Norton. (With complex sensibilities, Donald explores the origins of consciousness as a uniquely human experience. This persuasive theory proposes that the human mind is a hybrid of complex neural networks and invisible cultural webs of meaning. It is culture, in which Donald provocatively muses, that we have found our greatest representational and cognitive achievement as a species - our ability to use language.)

Ehrlich, Paul, R. 2000. Human natures: Genes, cultures, and the human prospect. New York: Penguin. (Criticizing the Machiavellian (and currently commonsensical) assumption that humans are naturally evil creatures, Ehrlich adopts a complexivist sensibility in this examination of human natures. He argues that human nature is much more polymorphous than commonly believed, a complex product of bottom-up genetic coding, lateral environmental influences, and top-down cultural enframements.)

Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The death and life of great American cities. New York: Random House. (A foundational text that provides one of the earliest and most influential attempts to apply complexivist sensibilities to social science phenomena. In her brilliant and groundbreaking analysis Jacobs argues for the understanding of cities to be investigated as a form of emergent and organized complexity. Some forty years after it was first published this text still remains the authority on city planning and urban renewal. A rich and fruitful read for all disciplines of study.)

Johnson, Steven. 2001. Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software. New York: Simon and Schuster. (In this very accessible text, Johnson captivatingly describes how decentralized local interactions can lead to bottom up emergent macro-phenomena as diverse as the collectivity of ant colonies, the development of cities, and the evolution of the World Wide Web. A highly recommended and engaging text that provides for an elegant introduction to the fundamental principles of complexity science.)

Johnson, Ken, Tedd Herr, and Judy Kysh. 2004. Crossing the river with dogs: Problem solving for college students. Emeryville, CA: Key College Publishing. (This textbook offers a variety of powerful strategies that can be utilized to solve a wide variety of mathematical problems. When these problems are combined with a complexivist orientation to teaching and learning they can be used to help prompt or occasion many diverse and novel solutions to solve mathematical problems. Overall, this textbook provides a type of 'how-to' guide that will be of significant value to mathematics teachers. Its richness resides in its comprehensive approach and its constant
leaning toward diversity.)

Juarrero, Alicia. 1999. Dynamics in action: Intentional behavior as a complex system. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. (A sophisticated and demanding examination of the differences between voluntary and involuntary behavior. Juarrero reframes "causality" in terms of the interplay of bottom-up dynamics and emergent top-down constraints, in the process offering a complexity-based account of action and responsibility.)

Kaneko, Kunihiko, and Ichiro, Tsuda. 2000. Complex systems: Chaos and beyond. A constructive approach with applications in Life Sciences. New York: Springer.(These Japanese authors explore and hope to provoke discussion on the relevance of chaos to complex systems as an 'antithesis between determinism and non-determinism, order and randomness, and reductionism and holism.' The book is written for a wide and interdisciplinary audience. The chapters on the science of complex systems, the significance of coupled chaotic systems to biological networks, and chaotic information processing in the brain will be of particular interest to educators.)

Kelly, Kevin. 1994. Out of control: The new biology of machines, social systems, and the economic world. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books. (Kelly develops a contextual and historical overview into the emergence of complexity science. He cogently argues that the rise of complex machines signifies a key transition towards a new bio-mechanical age. Kelly's text, with its multitude of examples, provides for an accessible insight into how complexity manifests itself in our everyday lives.)

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books. (Since the late 1970s, Lakoff and Johnson have been famous for arguing that human thought and language are mainly analogical-in particular, metaphorical-not logical. They offer a detailed explanation and justification of their theory in this lengthy tome as they align their work with research in complexity and cognitive sciences.)

Lewin, Roger, and Birute Regine. 2000. Weaving complexity and business: Engaging the soul at work. New York: Texere. (Written for CEOs and office managers, this text offers complexity-based advice for organizing the workplace. The explications of complexity are accessible and well-developed, and most of the implications are useful to educators.)

Luce-Kapler, Rebecca. 2004. Writing, with, through, and beyond the text: An ecology of language. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (Luce-Kapler explores understandings of writing and its influences on interpretations of experience and identity as she questions how literary processes influence learning and teaching. The author situates writing as an ecology, “a network of connected and nested systems within which a writer resides and works.”)

Maturana, Humberto, R., and Francisco J. Varela. 1987. The tree of knowledge. Boston: Shambala Publications Inc. (In this text Maturana and Varela explore a biological basis to knowledge. Based on evolutionary thinking, they focus on the change in biological structures of all living organisms in their self-making, and propose that knowing is doing is being. The authors posit that any living organism in its interaction with its environment is in the process of co-specifying the structure of both itself and its environment, which determine consequent interaction, and therefore knowledge. A must read.)

Merrell, Floyd. 1998. Simplicity and complexity: Pondering literature, science, and painting. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. (This is a book for seeing, feeling, thinking, differently. It increases accessibility to the infinite interdisciplinarity that simplicity and complexity inspires, by generatively mingling arts with science in discourse and words with diagrams in semiosis. Those with poststructural interests will appreciate an approach to the content that resists what the author terms “linguicentricity.” An important book for postparadigmatic educators.)

Morgan, Gareth. 1997. Images of organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. (Morgan interrogates the mechanics-based metaphorical frames that have long been used to characterize and organize the business world. He then offers alternative metaphorical frames rooted in complexity discourses. The book was a bestseller in the business sector.)

Morin, Edgar. 2001. La méthode 5. L'humanité de l'humanité: L'identité humaine. Paris, Seuil. (Edgar Morin is a famous French sociologist and philosopher who has written fifty books, although very few of those (like his classic book The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man , written in 1956, and the insightful S even Complex Lessons in Education for the Future ) were translated into English. One of his best books, entitled L'humanité de l'humanité : L'identité humaine , is the fifth part of a six volume collection known in French as "La méthode". In Morin's salient book, "La méthode" is not about methodology, but rather about epistemology and complexity. The author suggests an interdisciplinary approach to study all phenomena in an effort to understand issues related to global crisis, the environment, and political conflicts. For Morin, complexity does not mean a "complicated" approach, rather his writing explores how different issues and causes are linked together, which all have to be understood according to their specific contexts.)

Palombo, Stanley R. 1999. The emergent ego: Complexity and coevolution in the psychoanalytic process. Madison, CT: International Universities Press. (Drawing on work by Stuart Kauffman, Christopher Langton, Per Bak, and many others, Palombo contradicts Freud's assumption that the ego's work in organizing the contents of the unconscious can take place without the aid of an analyst.   Rather, Palombo shows that psychological change, or learning, relies on the analyst-analysand relationship and the coevolution that naturally accompanies creative human interaction.   Palombo's applications of such concepts as fitness landscapes, phase transitions, self-organization, and attractors to psychoanalytic work is relevant to classrooms as well, where teachers and students ideally collaborate to effect healthy transformations in themselves and others.)

Sanders, Irene, T., and Judith A. McCabe. 2003. The use of complexity science:
A survey of Federal departments and agencies, private foundations, universities, and independent education and research centers. Washington, DC: Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy. (A report commissioned for the U.S Department of Education that reviews current complexity-related initiatives and programs in the United States. This report provides a goldmine of information for those who are interested in how complexity science is currently being utilized within a plethora of research, business, and education communities. This report represents the most comprehensive survey of the interdisciplinary field of complexity science published to date.) Available online: http://www.hcs.ucla.edu

Scott, Alwyn. (Ed.). (2005). Encyclopedia of nonlinear science. New York: Routledge. (The purpose of this exhaustive resource is to provide a source of information from which students and researchers can explore how concepts from nonlinear science are presently understood and applied. The encyclopedia was created with an international board of advisors with 438 descriptive entries of at least a 1000 words in length. The encyclopedia contains an excellent index and unique thematic list that allows the reader to “surf” and explore connections. Themes include history of nonlinear science; common examples of nonlinear phenomena; analytical methods; computational methods; topological methods; chaos, noise and turbulence; coherent structures; dynamical

Stewart, Ian, and Jack Cohen. 1997. Figments of reality: The evolution of the curious mind. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (The authors extend the project of anticipating the possibilities for complexity research, begun in their 1994 book, The collapse of chaos . Here they focus on the emergence of mind and imagination, drawing on complexity-based research in physics and biology to make sense of the co-emergence of consciousness and civilization.)

Thomashow, Mitchell. 2002. Bringing the biosphere home: Learning to perceive global environmental change. Cambridge: The MIT Press. (Thomashow beautifully draws upon metaphor, imagery, and emotion to weave together a narrative of his personal experiences and literary and scientific works, as he explores the existential dilemmas and ecological dimensions of global environmental change. This book develops an important understanding of a place-based perceptual ecology, which becomes an authentic pedagogical means for conceiving of the biosphere and global environmental change.)

Varela, Francisco, J. 1999. Ethical know-how: Action, wisdom, and cognition
(L. Gius & R.B Figli, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (This influential, yet short and dense text reflects Varela’s active involvement and contributions he made to understanding humanity through his Buddhist philosophy and psychology and contemporary western science. Based on a series of invited lectures in Italy in the early 1990s on ethics, Varela provides an enactivist account of the inseparability of knowing, being and doing, while also offering a number of complexity-related connections in this East-West comparative view of ethical behaviour.)

Varela, Francisco, J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 1991. The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. (Drawing on phenomenology, cognitive neuroscience, and Buddhist thought, the authors offer accounts of identity and consciousness as emergent. While echoing many of the themes of complexity science, the book was not originally conceived in complexivist terms.)

von Foerster, Heinz. 2003. Understanding understanding: Essays on cybernetics and cognition. New York: Springer-Verlag. (This book is a collection of essays that range from highly mathematical treatises to polemics on world peace. For students of complexity theory, the book is useful in terms of insights into early developments in the field, especially from 1950 to 1970. Trained as a physicist, von Foerster theorizes on memory, brains, and epistemology. Educators will find little here that is directly relevant to their profession, but there are “nuggets” throughout that are worth considering for their insight into the processes of learning and thinking.)

Waldrop, M. Mitchell. 1992. Complexity: The emerging science at the edge of order and chaos. New York: Simon & Schuster. (This journalistic-style book follows the careers of Brian Arthur, Stuart Kauffman, and John Holland and other thinkers associated with the Santa Fe Institute who helped give rise to the emerging science of complexity. Waldrop characterizes the features of complex systems and describes how these thinkers used complexity to understand phenomena such as climate, large scale political changes, stock market crashes, and the human mind.)

Watts, Duncan, J. 2003. Six degrees: The science of a connected age. New York: W. W. Norton. (An accessible book that explores how the science of networks can help us to better understand the increasingly complex and interconnected world in which we live. Watts draws upon the complexivist principles of emergence, randomness, synchrony, collectivity, and nonlinearity as he traces cultural fads, financial crises, epidemics, and organizational innovation to help readers more fully understand and appreciate the science of networks and the implications that they can reveal.)

JOURNAL ARTICLES

Weaver, Warren. 1948. Science and complexity. American Scientist 36:536-544. (The foundational article that has fundamentally shaped and defined the field of complexity science research. Despite the date of publication, this article still provides for a complex, insightful, and provocative account into what science is and what science should be.) Available online: http://www.ceptualinstitute.com/genre/weaver/weaver-1947b.htm