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finance like the futures exchange or immunological networks or our own brains, highly-connected systems shared what Holland labeled an “evolving structure” - they never stayed the same. They seemed to shift, with an easy plasticity, in response to internal pressures or external changes. In the process, they took on new forms. In many cases, they became better, stronger, more adaptively fit. It wasn’t simply that the unexpected appeared, it was that the systems were evolving. We talked earlier about how political and economic ideas like serfdom or divine right fade into history as new forms - a congress, a stock market - are born to replace old ones. Holland thought the world filled with such evolutions, no different than species adjusting (or not) to a hotter climate or some fast new predator. He called the networks that produce these sorts of innovations “Complex Adaptive Systems”. When Holland chose the word “complex” he was making an important distinction. Complicated mechanisms can be designed, predicted and controlled. Jet engines, artificial hearts or your calculator are complicated in this sense. They may contain billions of interacting parts, but they can be laid out and repeatedly, predictably made and used. They don’t change. Complex systems, by contrast, can’t be so precisely engineered or guessed at with much real certainty. They are hard to fully control. Human immunology is complex, in this sense. The World Wide Web is complex. A rainforest is complex: It is made up of uncountable buzzing, connecting bugs and birds and trees.1!2 Order, to the extent it exists in the Amazon basin, emerges moment-by-moment from countless, constant interactions. The uneven symphonic sound of L’heure Blue, that romantic stopping point at dawn when the night retreats bug by bug and you can hear the forest wakeing bird by bird is the sound of complexity engaging in a never-the-same-twice phase transition. The word “complex” comes to us from the Latin world plex, which nods at the interwoven, layered nature of any object!!3. What looks simple - a flower, our skin, the value of a dollar bill - is in fact plexus, loaded with twitches and influences. In that stitching of new links, countless interactions sort of inevitably hiccup into unexpected states and ideas and objects: financial panics or disease epidemics, banks and revolutions. Traffic during rush hour is a complex system like this - the atomic, moving bits of the system, of cars and pedestrians and bicycles together determine the ultimate state of the system: jammed or no. Los Angles at 5 p.m. ona Friday isn’t designed centrally; it’s honking and confused and aggravated rush hour logic appears - slightly different every day - from interaction. . As any system fills out with more actors and more types of connection, it becomes more complex and harder to predict. Complicated systems don’t produce uncertainty in this same way; appealingly, they just run. Strapping a complicated object to the wing of a passenger plane makes sense, even if it takes decades of refinement to real reliability. A complex object? Not so wise. 112 A rainforest: Simon A. Levin, Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons, (Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1999) 113 The word: Carlos Gershenson, “The Implications of Interactions for Science and Philosophy”, arXiv:1105.2827v1, May 13, 2011 85 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018317