Why read The Collapse of Chaos?

Book cover of The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World

Book description

Moving on from his books on chaos ("Does God Play Dice?") and symmetry ("Fearful Symmetry"), the author of this book deals with the wider field of complexity theory. The book tackles the question of how complexity arises in nature, of how life overcomes chaos and entropy to create developing order.…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Collapse of Chaos as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Michael Edgeworth McIntyre

Author

It achieves an important and unusual cross-fertilization between two very different kinds of expertise. Both authors are highly innovative, and creative, thinkers, Cohen in biology and Stewart in mathematics.

Cohen is a biologist fascinated by the complexity observed in the living world, and Stewart is an expert on the mathematics of chaos and complexity. The result is a profound and multifaceted view of many natural phenomena, and of evolution in particular. It becomes very clear how selfish-gene theory fails to take account of important evolutionary mechanisms.

From Michael's list on to get you past selfish-gene theory.