History of the science of complexity

Why a history?

Like the discipline of ecology more than a hundred years earlier, the science of complexity has emerged from a rich and diverse background of existing disciplines. The earliest works that could be called 'complexity research' were published in journals dedicated to other disciplines, since no complexity journals then existed. And far more so than in the case of ecology, these journals are very diverse. Early thinking about complexity is to be found in biology (especially ecology, neurology and immunology), the social sciences (especially economics and sociology), mathematics and physics (especially catastrophe theory), and computer science (especially artificial life and learning algorithms).

Now that the science of complexity is becoming recognised, and its jargon standardised, there is a danger that these early contributions, using different jargon and publishing in different journals, will be lost to our sight. At best, we may lose a rich connection to the origins of complexity thinking, and at worst, we may rediscover ideas that were well understood decades ago.

The problem is made particularly acute by the development of the internet, a delightful irony given the significant contributions that the science of complexity has made to the internet, and the centrality of the internet to complexity research, connecting its highly dispersed research community. The internet is a problem because much of the pioneering work was done in the 1970s and 80s, the couple of decades leading up to its creation, with what might be called 'proto-complexity' work being recognisable in the 1950s and 60s. Since this work is generally not available on the internet, is spread widely through the journals, and uses non-current jargon, it may be nearly invisible to many researchers.

In these pages, we are seeking to recover our history, to analyse its significance and to link it to current work in the science of complexity.

What will it look like?

We plan to create a collection of brief biographies of scientists, together with bibliographies of their work, and copies of their seminal (and often hard to obtain) works. We will augment this database with commentaries on the emergence and evolution of the key ideas and concepts of the science of complexity. We accept that the same ideas and concepts often emerged and evolved independently from different 'background' disciplines.

We will look for work that has some of the hallmarks of complexity thinking even if it is not expressed in modern jargon. And we will look for work that crosses the boundaries of the traditional science disciplines, and perhaps explores the congruence of phenomena across those boundaries.

Where will we start?

We will start in the middle - in the 1970s and 80s, so that we can work forward linking our history with the known material in the domain of the internet, and backwards to the earlier, but still important work.

We have chosen, as nuclei for our explorations, the works of four prominent scientists. They have each studied complex systems from what we would now see to be a fully modern perspective. Indeed they may be said to have made major contributions in creating that perspective. Each saw that they were pioneering a different way of doing science.

Paulien Hogeweg, of the Netherlands, created the idea of 'individual based' models, and used these ideas in an early series of papers that fully anticipated much of the current work on 'agent based' models.

W T (Bill) Williams, of the UK and Australia, saw the potential of computers in the 1950s for the multivariate analysis of ecological communities, and introduced these ideas to several generations of marine and terrestrial ecologists.

Richard Levins, of the USA, gave the dominant school of ecology in the US its complexity stripes, demonstrating how ecological systems were complex systems.

E C (Chris) Pielou, of Canada, took field ecology to new heights with her rigorous mathematical approach and her insistence that complex issues like diversity could be handled in a robust mathematical way.

Each of these outstanding scientists strongly influenced the way the science of complexity developed, just as their predecessors influenced each of them. They make an excellent place to start our history.

Who can help?

We invite all our scientific colleagues to join us on this journey. We will be pleased to receive ideas, commentary and criticism.

Please respond to history@tjurunga.com