5 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
American Jungian analyst and philosopher who has developed the relationship between Jungian psychology and complexity theory — arguing that archetypes are better understood as emergent dynamic patterns rather than fixed templates, drawing on chaos theory and evolutionary biology.
Richard Dawkins's 1986 book arguing that natural selection is sufficient to explain biological complexity — no designer required — using the analogy that a watchmaker (designer) who never sees the final product is effectively blind, while evolution builds complexity through accumulated small improvements.
Eric Beinhocker's 2006 argument that the economy is a complex adaptive system (not an equilibrium system) and that wealth is created through evolution of business 'plans' competing in the fitness landscape of the market.
Donella Meadows's posthumously published 2008 introduction to systems thinking — covering stocks and flows, feedback loops, delays, and leverage points — the clearest and most accessible systems thinking primer available.
Philosophical and scientific concept — describing the phenomenon whereby higher-level properties, patterns, or behaviors arise from lower-level interactions in ways that cannot be predicted or reduced to those lower-level components — one of the most important concepts in contemporary philosophy of mind, biology, and complexity science.