OK Folks

A few weeks back Andrew Innes suggested that we compile a useful reading
list for people new to complexity.
So what would you include?

Rather than have everybody send a list, please name one book and give a few
reasons why it is worthwhile. The recommendations need not just be for
complete beginners either.

I suppose I ought to start the ball rolling with "complexity and
postmodernism" but someone else can do justice to that. Instead my starter
is a fairly peripheral one: "The Panda's Thumb" by Stephen Jay Gould.

This collection of short essays on evolutionary topics is fascinating.
Written 20 years ago his recurring themes are of interdependency between
agents within complex adapting (evolutionary) systems, the fact that change
is neither necessarily progress (as in toward an ultimate goal) nor gradual
(instead there are interspersed phases of dramatic discontinuous change and
of minimally adaptive stability), and that science is ultimately contextual
however much we pretend it stands in isolation of all around it. Gould's
thinking and writing are always clear and his use of the language of
complexity (despite pre-dating much of the boom in thinking on the topic) is
intriguing.

That's a pretty crappy book review for a lovely book, so let's here it from
the rest of you.

Cheers


Chris

Dr Chris Burton
List-owner complexity-primary-care
Member of WestNet, the West of Scotland Primary Care Research Network
http://medicine21.com/complexity