Complex Systems
Complex systems are systems with multiple interactive components. They include everything from, say, atoms to the universe at large. In biology, they encompass everything from the single cell to entire ecologies. Also included are man-made systems, such as computers, machines, businesses, cities, states, and even nations. Moreover, these assemblages can be difficult to model accurately, as their various constituents can have cooperative, competitive and even compromising relations.
Complex systems are often products of regulatory feedback, which leads to spontaneous order, adaptation, emergence, and more. In recent decades, scientists have thus been finding that the study of complex systems overlaps enormously with the study of adaptive systems. These are ensembles that are able to maintain equilibrium via responses to internal stimuli, external stimuli, or both. Again, in life this includes everything from cells to ecosystems; but scientists are finding that adaptive, regulatory control occurs well beyond the scope biology.
To provide a nonbiological example, star formation occurs when a region of space becomes cold due to the death of its stars. Star formation slows, however, when the region is warm from all of the stars that have ignited. We thus have a temperature-sensitive switch, or regulatory mechanism, that turns star formation on and off accordingly (Smolin 1999).
Naturalist D. B. Kelley holds that everything from space-time to the universe at large is a complex, adaptive system governed via regulatory feedback. In short, the sinusoidal wave representing the cyclical activity of any system shows that its behavior is self-regulating. The wave’s many peaks reveal points where the wave has self-corrected (moving down instead of up), and the many trough’s reveal points where it also self-corrects (moving up instead of down). These recurrent fluctuations take place among rabbits, wolves, atoms, molecules, stars, their internal processes, their populations, and everything else. Basically, because all natural phenomena can be modeled accordingly, it soon becomes evident that each is a self-regulating entity governed via stable, regulatory control.
Scientists have been finding that another guiding principle aiding in the self-organization of complex systems is selection, or survival of the fittest itself. Because our universe is so highly interactive—complete with competition among ensembles—Kelley calls this ‘survival of the fittest systems.’ Whether it’s blind natural selection or its successor, true rational selection, selection is always at work, shaping assemblages in every regard. While this means survival of the fittest systems in nature, it means survival of the fittest ideas (which are also systems) among people. As is the case in life, the number of selections performed by both nature and people is of course enormous. Consequently, this results in the preservation of stable ensembles and the elimination of the weakest ensembles in biology, anthropology, and science as a whole.
The study of complex systems is therefore an extremely broad and growing area of inquiry. There appears to be no line of demarcation showing where the subject either begins or ends. Recent findings are revealing that all of nature’s many phenomena are ultimately adaptive systems. They are capable of maintaining their own cyclical activity via the self-regulation that follows from both negative feedback and selection. Although there are many other mechanisms at work among such assemblages, these two devices alone allow us to understand the very foundations upon which all such complex, adaptive systems have come to be.