Since natural selection requires a function to select, an irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would have to arise as an integrated unit for natural selection to have anything to act on.
With its billions of interconnected neurons, whose interactions change from millisecond to millisecond, the human brain is an archetypal complex system.
With increasing fervor since the 1980s, sustainability has been the watchword of scientists, environmental activists, and indeed all those concerned about the complex, fragile systems on the sphere we inhabit. It has shaped debates about business, de...
From the late 1940s, into and through the '50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mas...
Intelligent design is a modest position theologically and philosophically. It attributes the complexity and diversity of life to intelligence, but does not identify that intelligence with the God of any religious faith or philosophical system.
Our society is intertwined with the economy that we've built, which is a fantastically complex system. I hope that my writing about it might do some good, but that's not why I do it.
Hierarchical organization in biological systems thus is characterized by an exquisite array of delicately and intricately interlocked order, steadily increasing in level and complexity and thereby giving rise neogenetically to emergent properties.
As we get more transparent with data sets about infrastructure and systems management, I have a feeling we'll see big changes in how we think about complexity and our relationship to our actions.
You can find academic and industrial groups doing some relevant work, but there isn't a focus on building complex molecular systems. In that respect, Japan is first, Europe is second, and we're third.
Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.
The task of teaching has never been more complex and the expectations that burden teachers are carried out in antiquated systems that offer little support—and yet, teachers are finding success every day.
Business requires understanding financial matters, but management is different from running the financial aspects of the business - it requires understanding complex systems, how they operate, the nature of organisations, what happens when people int...
We do care about planets like the Earth because by now we understood that life as a chemical system really needs a smaller planet with water and with rocks and with a lot of complex chemistry to originate, to emerge, to survive.
There is no economy without airlines. Airfreight runs the world. There is no Honolulu without an airplane. This is a very complex system. If you take it down, you can't build it back up overnight.
You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient.
Some people suggest that the problem is the separation of powers. If you had a parliamentary system, the struggle for power would not result in such complex peace treaties that empower so many different people to pursue so many contradictory aims.
God has given us more than fourteen billion cells and connections in our brain. Why would God give us such a complex organ system unless he expects us to use it?
In order for us to live within this finely balanced constellation of complex systems, in order for the Earth to show resilience and last for centuries into the future as an environment of human life, we have to embody three things: a respect for Eart...
The Metaphoton is a web of energy fields or complexes - having three hierarchical complexes called the light complex, mind complex and spirit complex.
The single hardest part of leading any organization is knowing what is going on. There's too much noise in the system, too much complexity: you absolutely depend on people speaking up and raising concerns.
Our technologies become more complex while we become more simple. They learn about us while we come to know less and less about them. No one person can understand everything going on in an iPhone, much less pervasive systems.
