The methods employed by complexity scientists—the stepchildren of the cyberneticists and chaos theorists of the twentieth century—achieve something that the reductionist approach is fundamentally incapable of: They allow us to understand how nature’s building blocks spontaneously self-assemble through a synergistic dance that creates wondrous emergent phenomena, like life, mind, and civilization. It turns out that the collective behavior of interacting parts, not simply how they function in isolation, is key to understanding the emergence and evolution of all the fascinating organisms and ecosystems that make up the biosphere.

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