Chaos and Life

Complexity and Order in Evolution and Thought

Richard J. Bird

322 pages, parution le 09/01/2004

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Résumé

"Dick's explanations of chaos, stability - chaostability - life and love, climate and culture are usually rigorous, often romantic - and none the worse for that. They are thorough and clear, whether maths or handwaving, logic or Gaia. His emphasis on iteration, recursion and consequent emergence of new properties will explain Complexity thinking to many recruits, but his exposition of problems of organic evolution will upset orthodox biologists who think they understand it. I enjoyed having my cage bars rattled."

Jack Cohen, co-author of The Collapse of Chaos, Figments of Reality, and Evolving the Alien

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 peopleŽs everyday existence.

Evolutionary biology rests on the assumption that although all 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. He postulates that the genome replication system is a Turing machine and can perform the necessary chaotic calculations. 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.

L'auteur - Richard J. Bird

is a senior lecturer at Northumbria University, UK. He is president of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life Sciences.

Sommaire

Foreword
Prologue: The Dawn of Man?
Iteration and Sequence
The Problems of Biology
The Origin of Species
Chaos and Dimensionality
Chaostability
The Geometry of Life
The Living Computer
Morphology and Evolution
Life, Entropy and Randomness
The Effectiveness of Mathematics
Life and Conflict
The World as Iteration and Recursion

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Caractéristiques techniques

	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	Columbia University Press
Auteur(s)	Richard J. Bird
Parution	09/01/2004
Nb. de pages	322
Format	16 x 23,5
Couverture	Relié
Poids	575g
Intérieur	Noir et Blanc
EAN13	9780231126625
ISBN13	978-0-231-12662-5