The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that I have found what I was searching for without ever having discovered what it was.
—Peter Matthiessen, “The Tree Where Man Was Born”
Over the past two decades I’ve had the great pleasure of participating in a wonderful scientific endeavor. Whether this quest is on the fringe or the frontier of science may well depend on where you stand and the direction in which you are looking. When I started down this path, I took to heart Thomas Pynchon’s edict that “we have to look for routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid,” and I embraced a new style of modeling that used the ever-growing power of computation on problems that heretofore had been too complex to analyze. My goal was to focus on the big problems that had motivated me to pursue science in the first place, notwithstanding the constant pressure in graduate school and beyond to redirect such inquiries down a narrow path prescribed by the prevailing paradigm.
In 1988 I was fortunate to join a small group of like-minded thinkers hiding out in the high deserts of New Mexico. From such modest beginnings a new wave of complex-systems thinking emerged. Given the heavy investment of most academic institutions and scientists in traditional paradigms and fields, this new work was easily dismissed at first. This dismissal turned out to be rather fortunate, as it allowed an ever-growing group of creative and talented scientists—each of whom for one reason or another felt the need to think differently—to escape the bounds dictated by the academic establishment and to create new forms of scientific inquiry and institutions better suited to taking on the important problems in the world. Our group formulated problems around core ideas, such as adaptation and robustness, rather than traditional academic fields. We embraced a new set of tools made possible by the information age and developed new methods to move beyond the nineteenth-century toolbox used by most scientists. We created new forms of academic institutions, such as the Santa Fe Institute, that embodied the revolutionary mind-set that was fermenting, allowing the easy interchange of ideas, examples, and tools across formerly isolated academic fields. The act was outrageous enough that the traditional academic powers ignored our activities, giving us the needed time to refine our ideas and methods so that we could start to seriously challenge the prevailing norms.
In the intervening years, the field of complex systems has had time to coalesce. Complex systems has always been a field that transcends the usual academic boundaries. Yet, across this vast array of science, a small set of key ideas has emerged, and it is these ideas that will be the focus of this book. My own interests center around complex social systems—that is, systems composed of interacting, thoughtful (but perhaps not brilliant) agents—and most of the examples presented here will be drawn from this domain.
Since the field of complex systems is rapidly evolving, this book is about both the known and the possible. Thus, some of the work discussed here is well grounded in long-standing research efforts, while other parts are of a more speculative nature. My hope is that the combination will convey the excitement of the ongoing quest while also establishing the future prospects for the complex-systems point of view. Of course, any such excursion will, by necessity, be a selective swath through a large field of existing ideas.
Some of the research discussed in this book is the result of past or ongoing collaborations with Simon DeDeo, Russell Golman, Steve Lansing, Scotte Page, Tom Seeley, Michele Tumminello, and Ralph Zinner. Discussions with Walter Fontana, Van Savage, and Geoffrey West have also been instrumental in refining some of the material. Moreover, the various threads of thought weaving their way throughout this work have benefited from discussions with, and encouragement from, Phil Anderson, Ken Arrow, Brian Arthur, Bob Axelrod, Ted Bergstrom, Ken Boulding, Jim Crutchfield, Robyn Dawes, Doyne Farmer, Paul Fischbeck, Murray Gell-Mann, John Holland, Erica Jen, Stu Kauffman, Steven Klepper, Blake LeBaron, George Loewenstein, Cormac McCarthy, Norman Packard, Richard Palmer, John Rust, Cosma Shalizi, Carl Simon, Herb Simon, Peter Stadler, and Hal Varian. Robert Hanneman, Steve Lansing, Baldomero Olivera, Jacob Peters, Tom Seeley, and Geoff West were all kind enough to provide some of their research materials to generate some of the figures. Laurence Gonzales undertook a careful reading of the manuscript, as did my editor, T. J. Kelleher, and I’m grateful to both of them for their suggestions. During the final stages of the book, Sue Warga and Melissa Veronesi provided key contributions. Finally, thanks to my agent, Jim Levine, for championing this project.
I’ve also been fortunate to participate in two remarkable scientific institutions: Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). Both places have the same ethos, namely, to find incredibly creative and smart people and put them in an environment that encourages answering the important questions by collaborating across the usual boundaries while minimizing institutional distractions. Maintaining such an environment is hard, and I’m thankful for farsighted and entrepreneurial administrators, such as SFI’s founder, George Cowan, who create such academic playgrounds. After a long stint as a department head at CMU, I’ve come to recognize the challenges of making such institutions work, and I’m grateful to Jerry Sabloff (president of SFI), Jennifer Dunne and Doug Erwin (current and former, respectively, chairs of faculty of SFI), Mark Kamlet (former provost of CMU), and John Lehoczky (former dean of CMU), who devote a remarkable amount of energy to making such institutions work. Other key folks at SFI who have been helpful include Marcella Austin, Patrisia Brunello, Ronda Butler-Villa, Juniper Lovato, Nate Metheny, Ginger Richardson, Janet Rubenstein, Hilary Skolnik, Laura Ware, and Chris Wood. At CMU I headed the Department of Social and Decision Sciences (aka the department that studies interacting and thoughtful agents), and I’m grateful for the wonderful group of colleagues who have surrounded me while in Pittsburgh. Writing a book and running a department are not always compatible activities, and my business manager, Sarah Bernardini, has been gracious and productive throughout this process; I’m thankful to her, to my assistant, Mary Anne Hunter, and to my other staff members for their help throughout the years.
Finally, thanks to my family and the “Lower-Waldron Commune,” my friends and neighbors in Pittsburgh, who allow me to participate in a remarkable and vibrant community that demonstrates daily the right purpose and wonderful promise of complex social systems.
J. H. Miller,
August, 2014, Tesuque, New Mexico