A practice in the science of complexity
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| Thinking: | Tjurunga on complexity | Reference books | Complexity sites | |
Have you ever wondered how people can be so stupid? I mean so seriously stupid, the sort of stupidity that leads to death. Even men with their four billion extra neurones do particularly stupid things, perhaps particularly men.
I want to talk about this a little because it is really interesting. I think I can discern at least two quite different sorts of terminal stupidity. The first is a sort of mega-stupidity, a sort of weird multi-sigma event that puts a person in the running for a Darwin award. This is the long running and hilarious thread in cyberspace that tracks people who, by spectacularly selecting themselves out of further involvement in the evolution of our species, make our own genes just that little bit more secure. A typical and recent example concerns a now-dead good old boy, who ended up at a rock concert without his trousers, with a holly branch up his arse, and squashed beneath his pickup truck, which had dropped on him from a great height.
The incredible details need not concern us here, because I really don' t want to dwell on this sort of stupidity. I want to concentrate on the other sort of stupidity I have discovered. While it is also seriously stupid, it is so in a much more serious way. It is the stupidity that leads quite serious and intelligent people to die, to deal themselves out of the evolutionary game.
Here are some recent and spectacular examples. There are lots of others in sad little ones and twos.
In March this year, 40 members of the Heaven' s Gate sect, 'shed their containers' with the help of lethal doses of vodka and phenobarbitol, to get on a companion craft hiding in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet.
In 1994, 48 members of the Order of the Solar Temple sect in Switzerland and 5 more in Quebec ritually suicided so that they could enjoy rebirth on the star Sirius. They were joined by 16 more in Grenoble in 1995 and another 5 in Quebec in 1997 on that happy world.
In 1993, at least 70 Branch Davidians died in Texas in a combined suicide, skeet shoot and barbeque at the invitation of David Koresh, whom they believed was Jesus Christ.
Aha, you say, these people are all wackos, on the fringes of normal society, sects, cults and the like. Not PLUs - people like us. Well, how about something more in the mainstream: Hamas suicide bombers in Israel; the resurgence of suttee, the self-immolation by a wife on her husband's funeral pyre, in India; Japanese kamikaze bombers in the last war, and all assaults across no-man's-land during WWI for that matter. Or further back to 73 AD, when 960 Jews committed suicide in their fortress of Masada rather than submit to a Roman seige. Even the priestly vow of celibacy in the Catholic Church is also death in evolutionary terms.
What force is it that is so strong that it can overcome the individual's own internal drive to survive? More importantly, and seen acutely in the celibate priesthood, what force is it that is so strong that it can overcome the individual's own internal drive to reproduce itself in the next generation?
I think that it is the force of ideas.
In this essay I want to explore this force, and examine its links with other evolutionary forces acting on us, and to see if we can harness any of these forces in the development of our organisations.
I will develop this theme in the following way. I want to start with the premise that we have all come together because we want to change things, that we have some ideas about how things are now, and how we would like them to be. Then, to set the context for change, I want to talk about how ideas and people interact. I want to suggest that we normally think of that interaction in quite a superficial way, but that, really, the interaction is quite subtle. It involves interactions between three quite distinct types of things: individuals, societies (or populations, if you are a biologist), and ideas. Crucially, these interactions have the character of evolutionary interactions.
I also want to suggest that these interactions lead to the development of what are now called complex adaptive systems and that these are tremendously recursive. That is, not only are the things that we wish to work on and change, such as our businesses or economies or sciences or whatever, complex adaptive systems, we ourselves are too, as are our ideas and our embedding societies.
This will bring me back to stupidity, and allow me to say something about scientific ideas specifically. And finally to conclude by arguing how the idea of complex adaptive systems can be used to diagnose and change human organisations.
But I am getting ahead of myself. To begin we need to talk a little about Charles Darwin and what Daniel Dennett (1995) calls Darwin's dangerous idea. Then we need to talk a little about Richard Dawkins' (1976) amazing discovery of memes before we can bring some of this together in the context of complex adaptive systems. But I want to keep Albert Einstein's (1984) admonition in the foreground: 'Everything should be made a simple as possible, but not simpler.'
This felicitous phrase is the title of Daniel Dennett's (1995) recent book. Through it, Dennett joins a famous lineage, beginning with Thomas Huxley - 'Darwin's bulldog' , of champions of Darwin and his idea of evolution by natural selection. Darwin has attracted these bulldogs, one or two for each new generation, because of the sublime power of his idea, perhaps the most powerful idea that has ever existed. As Richard Dawkins (1976), of whom we will hear more, said: 'Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them.'
Darwin was the first person to explain why we exist in a coherent and tenable way - in a scientific way.
He pointed to a set of irrefutable observations about the world: that there is variety, living things are not all alike; that all living things are born and all eventually die; that living things reproduce new living things that tend to look like them; and not all living things survive to reproduce themselves. From this came his idea of evolution, the creation and unfolding of life through the action of natural selection on the variety of living things, the tension between the continual throwing up of variety and its winnowing - some have said Darwinnowing - through natural selection, the survival of the fittest.
Darwin explained the diversity of life on earth without having to explain the way in which life's variety was brought forth and sustained. Mendel and the idea of genes as the vehicles for variety took another half century to intrude themselves into the Darwinian idea.
The Mendelian revolution - the discovery of genes - began a new phase in the evolution of Darwin's idea. It stretched it, although not immediately. For its first fifty years or so, it mostly served to strengthen and consolidate Darwin's idea, since it provided the long sought answer, in genes and the principles of Mendelian inheritance, for why offspring look like their parents even as they differ from them, and how the variety observed in the living world is created and maintained.
But Richard Dawkins (1976), in his famous book The selfish gene, took Darwin's ideas to genes themselves. He argued that, since genes had all the properties that Darwin observed in individuals, then genes must be the real units of natural selection, the real reason for the existence of life itself. He argued for a thoroughly gene-centred view of life, that individuals exist to serve their genes, that genes build bodies as machines to serve their own Darwinian purpose of survival.
Dawkins gave us a radical reinterpretation of Darwin, of eternal, enduring genes passing through ephemeral bodies, their transient, temporary hosts.
And he went further, into territory that troubled Darwin himself: he looked at human society.
While all living things have genes, argued Dawkins, only human beings have culture, and it exists in such variety that it needs to be examined as an object in its own right. He argued that human culture is the result of a process that is not only analogous to Darwinian evolution, it is an actual Darwinian evolutionary process, albeit one that does not use genes but ideas. Dawkins calls such ideas memes.
In his book, he explains that memes have all the qualities of evolutionary objects such as genes: that they use brains just as genes use bodies, but that, because of the speed with which they can pass from brain to brain, the speed of evolution of human culture is enormously greater than the evolution of genes.
By memes, Dawkins means complex ideas in the sense of something one might patent or copyright, not in the sense of an element of experience (Dennett, 1997). The idea of a wheel or an arch or a god or the market is a meme, so is the idea of hijacking an aeroplane. This last meme, one that tends to replicate itself even though it is not beneficial to people, captures the key to the nature of memes. Like genes, they do not exist to benefit us, the bodies or brains they inhabit. They exist because they are advantageous to themselves. And importantly, their survival does not necessarily depend on whether they are true or not. Herein lies a clue to stupidity.
But before we get too depressed and accept that our stupidity is just the playing out of some game between genes and memes with our bodies or brains as the ball, we need to look afresh at Darwin, Dennett and Dawkins from the emerging perspective of complex adaptive systems.
The idea of complex adaptive systems (CASs), which has developed over recent years, takes some of the ideas of Darwin and Dawkins, and then reflects them. CAS theory argues that Darwinian systems, whether genes or species are part of a larger more general class of systems which behave adaptively. They learn, even if they do not have all the attributes of evolving systems. That is, they may adapt, but they do not necessarily evolve.
Complex adaptive systems are often defined recursively. A typical definition goes:
A CAS is embedded in a larger CAS and is composed of semi-autonomous and heterogeneous parts or agents which are themselves CASs. A CAS receives information by interaction with the environment and with other agents. Each agent acts based on information input and on internal rules, all of which change over time.
Attributes of CASs include agent-driven processes, no central control, open environment, probabilistic events, non-linearity, non-equilibrium dynamics, adaptation, co-evolution, and emergence.
Genes, the immune system, individual plants and animals, insect societies, species and ecological systems, human cultures and organisations are all CASs.
Thus they include those things such as genes, individuals and species which are self-evidently Darwinian, but they also include ecosystems and social systems from ant colonies to human societies and organisations, all of which are more problematic.
Conventionally CASs do not include memes, but I am going to suggest that they should. If genes and individuals are CASs, then so are memes. But I will now suggest that if we admit memes we have created a new, more heady brew.
When we take the idea of memes from Dawkins, the idea of evolution and struggle from Darwin, the idea of recursion and embedding from CAS theory, we get an idea which is quite different from Dawkins' supremacy of the gene. We get different CASs interacting, struggling, but struggling for control of the same one bit of tissue. Here we have memes and genes, individuals and societies, competing, cooperating simultaneously, within the same CAS, and between CASs.
With this perspective, let us look at the world from the point of view of a meme. All a meme needs for its survival is enough brains in which to exist for the moment and the opportunity to replicate itself into new brains in the future. Together that is enough to ensure its survival. As an example, take the meme that declares it is better for a Viking to die in battle, because such heroes are transported directly to Valhalla. This meme survives because it is part of an interlocking and mutually reinforcing set of memes called Viking culture, not because it provides any advantage to the individual in whose brain it lives. But Viking society flourished for a time with such memes such as this, and so did this meme. The celibacy meme survives for similar reasons in Christian culture today.
This example show two things. First that memes, like genes, exist in clusters and complexes. Memes in these clusters may support each other, or some may even be parasites along for the ride. Whatever, they survive. Second, it shows that while the goals of memes and genes, individuals and societies are all the same - survival - the survival of any one is not necessarily related to the survival of any other. Indeed, one may survive at the expense of the other.
Walter Burkert (1996), in his new book Creation of the sacred: Tracks of biology in early religions, is right on the money when he says: 'Information survival asserts itself side by side with and even instead of genetic survival.'
In a strong sense, we may speak of competition as well as cooperation between these levels of organisation, these complex adaptive systems. They are bound together in the same physical entities, the physical bodies of individual organisms, in which they sometimes cooperate, but often compete, as each complex adaptive system struggles to survive.
The struggle has become more complicated through evolution, as each new level of organisation has emerged as a complex adaptive system able to evolve on its own as it were. Thus genes built individuals as systems to protect them from the environment, as 'their creatures' to help them survive. But individuals emerged as complex adaptive systems in their own right, and began a struggle for survival with their genes, sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing, which continues to this day.
In a similar way, societies (both animal and human) emerged as complex adaptive systems from individuals, as did memes, probably from societies.
The stupidity we discussed earlier then is nothing more than the triumph of a conspiracy between the meme and the society over the individual and the gene.
Religious examples are particularly useful here because they highlight the contrast between the meme and the gene, the survival of the idea versus the survival of the individual. But they also highlight the tension between the meme and what we might call evidence.
Go back to the Viking meme that it is good to die in battle, or the Hale-Bopp meme that the comet is waiting to take us away to the real world. What would be the effect on an individual infected by such a meme if he was confronted by good hard evidence to the contrary?
The honest answer must be, not much. First the memes concerned act in concert with other memes, and secondly, it is always a characteristic of religious memes that they are resistant to evidence anyway. That, after all, is one of the key reasons why they have survived.
To explain what I mean, here is Dennett (1997) in a recent review of Burkert's book:
'[Memes] may fulfill basic functions for us, but they may also do us no good at all, rather earning their keep by serving cultural parasites whose only master is their own replication. For instance, the meme declaring that reason is an inappropriate arbiter in matters of faith serves the replicative interests of whatever meme it joins, automatically deflecting rational criticism. That is obvious when it joins forces with preposterous ideas, such as trance channelling ("Don't you see? The trance is broken whenever a skeptic gets too close!"). But in every case it serves those interests independently of the actual value of the idea it helps to prosper.'
What is true for trance channelling is also true for any religious meme.
And even in the cases where the evidence starts to become overwhelming - Galileo's evidence that the earth moved around the sun and not vice versa, for example - the evidence, the new meme, is up against a powerful, mutually reinforcing meme complex, in Galileo's case to the point where the Holy Office forced his recantation.
So must we always expect that established memes will be hard to supplant? That new science memes will find it hard going. Is it the case, as Max Planck (1949) believed, that:
'A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.'
I think Planck was right but for the wrong reasons, because he didn't understand the memetic nature of scientific truths. Ideas do not just die out with their proponents, they die out as a result of a memetic struggle for places in brains, the limited resource they all require. However that struggle may take time, because established memes form reinforcing, mutually supporting complexes and clusters, and thus enhance their survival. But eventually, scientific memes should win out.
The best example of this may also be the most obvious.
Many social historians (Dyer, 1997) have pointed out that for most of the twentieth century we have been in thrall to the three big ideas of the nineteenth century: the ideas of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Even if one did not accept these ideas, they have provided the continuing reference point from which serious discussion began. But now only one of these really still exists, and it is stronger than ever. Marxism has been moribund for more than twenty years, the collapse of the Soviet system being not the cause, but only the most obvious symptom. Freudianism has sunk just as low, with Freudians being stigmatised as 'gatekeepers for Prozac' .
Only Darwin's dangerous idea has gone from strength to strength, and, as we have seen with the development of the idea of complex adaptive systems, increased the breadth and depth of its insight. And the key reason for this slow scientific triumph is that Darwinism, unlike the other big ideas, is a scientific idea, a scientific meme.
What has this all to do with us? As a scientific group, we have been using the idea of complex adaptive systems for some years now to help inform our work. But my analysis suggests we should take it further, we should apply it to ourselves.
We need to begin thinking of ourselves as complex adaptive systems composed of complex adaptive systems and embedded in complex adaptive systems. Somewhere in this recursive structure, memes also exist, themselves organised as complex adaptive systems.
But we, as a group, are a special sort of complex adaptive system, for we are constructed. We did not get here through a purely evolutionary process. We are subject to all the evolutionary forces that drive any complex adaptive system, but we are not necessarily coerced by them. We can have a goal beyond survival. And we can use our ideas about complexity to subvert those forces to our goal.
I recently visited the Santa Fe Center for Emergent Strategies. They are the first group in the world to apply the ideas of complex adaptive systems to understanding how such constructed systems work. This is still very much work-in-progress, but it is worth describing because of the new and powerful insights it offers.
Howard Sherman is one of the key people at the Center. His fundamental conjecture is that businesses do not fail because of the way they conduct their business, they mostly know how to do what they do well. They would not have existed to that point if they did not. He believes that they fail not in conduct but cognition - in the ways in which they formulate the ideas of the business.
He feels that the ideas underlying a business condition the behaviours of the business, and faulty ideas lead to faulty behaviours and failure. However he does not think that there is a simple, causal link between ideas and behaviours, rather that the link is subtle and mediated through other 'factors' each of which also contribute and modify behaviour.
His first attempt at articulating this is to think of a group of abstract entities which interact in a business as a special sort of complex adaptive system, a constructed, and hence goal-directed, CAS.
He identifies principles, models, rules and behaviours, but does not see crisp boundaries around any of them, nor does he insist that they cannot shift ground. Through the interaction with the observer, himself a CAS, different 'parts' of a business may be, at different times, identified with principles, models, rules and behaviours.
But generally, Sherman argues that principles - the underlying ideas on which the business is built - are the most abstract entity of this set, and that we should strive to identify the principle(s) of a business in the most abstract way possible. They are more abstract than the 'mission' or 'values' , but will probably embody them. Thus South West Airlines' principle is something like 'move people cheaply between two places' and Intel's is 'dominate the field by recreating it' .
At the other extreme, behaviours are the things that people do: make a product, ship an order, buy raw materials, pay a bill. They are concrete. They are action oriented. However you do not move from a principle to an act. Principles set the context for the act, but models and rules are needed between them.
Generally, any CAS has a rule set which tells it what to do in different situations, even though these can be overridden. Indeed the CAS may have several incompatible rule sets generated by some of the different semi-autonomous agents of which it is composed. Which rules to use in which circumstances then be comes solvable only if there is a model to refer to to help mediate between the conflicting rules.
We can think of rules in a business as the things which cover the ordinary life of the CAS. They are ways of talking about the behaviours which relate to very specific states of affairs or circumstances. They exist to keep a modicum of structure going in the system. They are entirely pragmatic and very important. But rules are not very responsive to changed circumstances, and individual instances may not fit the rules. There will be exceptions.
In a business there will be both explicit and implicit rules, the latter describing custom and culture of the business, the 'way we do things around here'.
In this sense, rules do not have much to do with behaviours. Rather they describe a framework for behaviours. Rules allow us to do things without 'thinking' about them. They 'mechanise,' enforce, and respond to the predictable parts of the world of the CAS. [This process is a metaphor of what reductionist science itself does with complex systems.]
Most behaviours in a CAS such as a business are self-generating in a sense, with dimensions of autonomy, novelty and responsibility, which run counter to the idea of a rule. Behaviours are about creating, formulating, interacting, while rules are specific and rigid but transitory. Rules do not generate behaviours. Rules and behaviours define a tension in a CAS between predictability and novelty, and between exploitation and exploration.
The essence of behaviour is often to choose between rules, referring to some model, while the essence of rule is to act as a check on behaviour so that it is not too disruptive to the 'normal' operation of the system.
Thus we may argue that agents, the parts of the CAS, are not rule-driven, but rule-contained.
Models (theories) have an openness that rules do not have. Models are a kind of link between principles and behaviours. Principles do not lead to any particular set of rules. They are too abstract, even though of crucial importance. Nor do they lead to only one model. A principle is consistent with many different models, because models are more exploratory, open, dialogic, and hypothetical than principles. Models are constructed by agents, but the agents are imperfect, incomplete in terms of their knowledge or understanding. Thus different, perhaps inconsistent, models may be constructed from the principle, and, from these, different rule sets may emerge.
If the world changes, the model(s) may need to change. This will lead to a change in the appropriate rule sets. The explicit rules may be easy to change, but the implicit ones may be hard to change, because they may have been generated by 'hidden' models which do not recognise or respond to the changed world.
The following relationships seem to be involved here:
We cannot analyse a business at the principle level all the time, because it is too abstract, nor at the rule level which is too concrete. The model is the middle ground which has strong links with the others, so it is a useful analytical point of entry.
Different people see different aspects of the business: the customer sees the behaviour, the employee the rules, the manager the model. No one sees the principle, but really all need to see all.
But understanding (describing) the principle remains of paramount importance. We may say that, in a deep sense, ideas are the geometry of behaviour. They are the source of the topology for making the behaviours sensible or intelligible. Sherman likens principles to Aristotelian final causes, they are future looking, they have to do with that which the thing is becoming. The other elements are more like Aristotelian material, efficient and formal causes in being more backward looking. He feels that the multidimensional Aristotelian conception of cause is much more appropriate for CASs than the simplistic, mechanistic cause of Cartesian reductionism.
To this useful view of a constructed CAS, I would add the comment that the elements we are discussing, principles, models, rules and behaviours, are all mimetic, and so have the potential to form their own CAS, leading to a deeper recursion and more interesting interactions.
The set of principles, models, rules and behaviour together with their relationships is suggestive (to me) of strategy. That is, strategy is that which provides a coherent linking between them for the effective (fit) operation of the CAS. It also suggests that the idea of the fitness of the CAS might be approachable through an examination of its strategy. Of course, this means that strategy is a fully recursive thing, since the links within the set of principles, models, rules and behaviour are recursive, even if some are stronger than others.
Strategy, in my view, is the embedding of principles, models, rules and behaviour in the CAS.
Indeed it may be that the strength of some of the links allows a non-recursive reductionist understanding to be developed. Even if the whole is not, many simple parts of a business, such as production, storage, procurement, are sufficiently like linear systems to allow short term extrapolation. This may be another example where the seductive linearity-to-a-first-approximation of CASs allows the existence of reductionist approaches.
If it is the case that strategy is approachable in this way, then it is an important idea. This is because, since we are ourselves CASs dealing with CASs with the recursivity that that implies, the way we think about things can affect the outcomes of the analysis process itself. Indeed it can affect all the CASs involved, ourselves included.
We may go so far as to say if an organisation thinks of itself in this way (as a CAS) it will be able to involve itself in certain activities that would otherwise be denied it. It may also be the case that it is denied certain activities but these are likely to be of a nasty limited reductionist kind.
The alternative is to continue to view the business in reductionist terms, to accept a mechanistic, atomistic, Newtonian view of the world. The whole modern world has been constructed on this idea of a rigid dualism, and thus business is thought of as taking place largely in mechanical terms with linear ideas of cause, fault, an abstract mechanical, equilibrial market 'out there' and so on. The CAS view says more things are under our control and there are more possibilities for change.
This allows us to develop the idea of a strategic diagnostics which would allow us to derive an understanding of the CAS through an understanding of its strategy, that is, the ways in which its principles, models, rules and behaviour work and interact.
There are, as yet, no metrics to measure the fitness or performance of a CAS in this way. But this perspective should allow us, at least, to ask better, crisper, more insightful questions. It may even be that the asking of questions rather than the getting of answers is a more characteristic (holistic) operation with CASs than is the case with simpler systems where the (reductionist) reverse holds.
With this insight, let us return to Sherman's idea that 'ideas are the geometry of behaviour'. Sherman maintains that businesses fail because they do not formulate the ideas of the business, the principle, properly. With his colleagues at the Center, Bruce Abell and Mike Simmons, he argues that the principle must be articulated and understood at an extremely abstract level. Taken together these suggest that the major problems of business must be expressible at the level of the principle and solvable there too. This perspective will allow us to ask questions about businesses that are not often asked.
Two strategic diagnostics being developed by Abell, Sherman and Simmons. They are based on their concept of the primacy of principle, and the corollary that the ratio of information to infrastructure is high in successful businesses.
The first strategic diagnostic is to look at decisions and how the business goes about them. How much does it assume linearity and hence lock out novelty and the possibility of emergence? The reductionist view of a business stigmatises novelty as error or noise, while the CAS views novelty as a source of adaptation. How does the business formulate its questions and what are the linear assumptions behind them? What would the world look like if it was discussed in a non-linear way? This diagnostic bears on the idea businesses have of themselves and the extent that they see themselves as CASs, since this perception itself can open up possibilities for adaptation that would otherwise remain closed.
The other strategic diagnostic is to look for lever points in the business, those places where little changes create a large impact. We need to ask questions about what sort of changes, what sort of impact and in which direction.
In creating new strategic diagnostics it is important to use a CAS approach. One of the most pervasive linear assumptions (really, underpinning much of reductionist science so thoroughly that it is not even noticed) is that induction, the generation of general principles, is equivalent to the generalisation from observations, while deduction is its obverse, and equivalent to the creation of predictions of instances from general theory. CAS theory suggests otherwise and that induction/deduction are themselves neither simple nor a pigeon pair.
When CASs are involved (really always, since we are always involved), induction is an emergent process where ideas emerge, some living and some dying, from an interaction between all the CASs. This is much closer to the Einsteinian (Schilpp, 1954) spirit of pragmatism of the creative act, and its need to solve problems:
'Physics constitutes a logical system of thought which is in a state of evolution, whose basis cannot be distilled, as it were, from experience by an inductive method, but can only be arrived at by free invention. The justification (truth to content) of the system rests on the verification of the derived propositions by sense experiences, whereby the relations of the latter to the former can only be comprehended intuitively.'
or, again
'A theory can be tested by experience, but there is no way from experience to the setting up of a theory.'
Again deduction plays a smaller role in CASs than in reductionist worlds, since the whole need for prediction is less important. With CASs we try to move from the idea of prediction to an analogue concept involving exploration and understanding. As Robert Oppenheimer noted, 'You don't understand QD, you just get used to it'.
Where does Cervantes' great idea, Don Quixote - the icon of our meeting today, fit in to this? Of course he is a meme, but a recursive one. The Man of La Mancha, the tilter at windmills, is a man of ideas. He is the one who enriches life's diversity, who adds golden threads to life's tapestry. He is the key to survival of any CAS he inhabits because he brings novelty and emergence. Were he 'alive' today, he would be a scientist, a meme in jeans. For while even Einstein could say 'God does not play dice', the Knight of the Doleful Countenance could reply: 'What I say is, patience, and shuffle the cards.'
Walter Burkert (1996) Creation of the sacred: Tracks of biology in early religions. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Richard Dawkins (1976) The selfish gene. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Daniel Dennett (1995) Darwin's dangerous idea. Simon & Schuster, New York.
Daniel Dennett (1997) Appraising grace: What evolutionary use is God? The Sciences 37 (1), 39-45.
Gwynne Dyer (1997) An ambitious theory of everything. Canberra Times 19 July 1997.
Einstein, a portrait. Pomegranate Books, 1984.
Max Planck (1949) A scientific autobiography.
Paul Arthur Schilpp (1954) Albert Einstein, philosopher, scientist.
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Last modified 16 August 2001