A Crude Look at the Whole

November 16, 2015
Economist Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems) lucidly explains his academic specialty, which seeks to identify the general principles by which the individual elements of systems, behaving independently, interact to achieve complex adaptive solutions to various environmental challenges. Miller contrasts this approach with traditional disciplines that reductively examine only individual elements, such as studying single neurons instead of the entire brain. Using examples of systems as different as beehives and economic markets, the book demonstrates how the repeated, decentralized application of simple algorithms can produce sophisticated solutions for organisms or groups. Miller shows how concepts such as data feedback loops, population heterogeneity, and social networks are relevant to his theories and describes how game theory, computer modeling, and modern statistical methods reveal the elegance and power of complex adaptive systems. He concludes that their appearance in widely varying contexts suggests an underlying “deeper unification among systems”—for example, that “a honeybee swarm may just be a more easily observed instance of a brain.” Not every reader will be convinced by these broader assertions, but Miller does provide a thought-provoking introduction to the study of complexity.

October 1, 2015
The world is complicated and getting more so. Or, as Miller (Economics and Social Sciences/Carnegie Mellon Univ.; co-author: Complex Adaptive Systems, 2007) puts it, more cheerfully, "complexity abounds." Yes, complexity does abound, for which reason scientists have given a great deal of attention to chaos, complex systems, networking, unintended consequences, and all the other pursuits that come into play when looking at things that have many moving parts. Take the stock market, for instance: even though the market is set to react at the merest hint of a trigger, investors hate uncertainty, which means that panicky behavior is almost built into the system, with "unfortunate feedback loops that [destine it] to fail." The author considers mere randomness as a central factor in complex systems, contending with which he memorably calls "discovery on rugged landscapes." Every mountaineer knows that a clear view ahead does not mean an easy path, and that's just so in the case of complex systems, be the task at hand planning airline schedules or evaluating investment possibilities. On that note, Miller praises the supply and demand diagram as "one of those rare and remarkable scientific illustrations that take a complex reality and summarize it in a simple, valuable way." Competitive equilibrium, quorum levels that satisfice, decentralized decision-making: Miller offers a vigorous survey of the tools, techniques, and ideas underlying complex systems and their study. As he optimistically observes, though earlier generations of scholars despaired of finding order in all the chaos, "complexity is an aspect of nature that is amenable to scientific analysis, understanding, and perhaps even control." Miller's explication throughout is clear, though he's dealing with some pretty arcane stuff, and it helps to have some background in economics, probability, and especially game theory]in short, to have prepared your own mental complex system to handle this thoroughly engaging variable. A valuable companion to confusion, though it's not without a few tangles of its own.

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December 1, 2015
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts is very much the theme of Miller's introduction to the characteristics of the complex systems that have long existed and that humans (and other forces) are constantly fashioning while never fully understanding them. Those characteristics include interaction, feedback, heterogeneity, noise, molecular intelligence, group intelligence, networks, scaling, cooperation, and self-organized criticality. To illustrate them, Miller presents examples specificfeedback in the flash crash of equities trading on May 6, 2010; group intelligence in the hives of honeybees; cooperation in the traditional rice farming of Baliand general, such as scaling in the relative metabolisms of different animals and networks in neighborhood lawn care and racial segregation. Complex systems confound specialization, individuality, selfishness, and other single-organism procedures, but studying them helps us discover true places, the kind Melville/Ishmael says in Moby-Dick are not down in any map, for true places never are. While Miller allows that his subject is demanding, he writes as accessibly about it as seems possible. Anyone caught by the fascination of complexity will read every word.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)