Sublime

Second, self-organisation is born out of a system’s capacity to make its own structures more complex, like a dividing cell, a growing social movement, or an expanding city.

Genetics is a question of how the information is transmitted between generations. Molecular biology is concerned with how it’s translated from DNA into protein. Developmental biology is concerned with how it’s translated from a set of proteins into a morphological structure. And evolutionary theory is essentially about how the information got there

Scientific models that seek to predict the consequences of human actions with some reasonable accuracy—such as game theoretical models of economic behavior—for the most part ignore human individuality in favor of aggregated outcomes.

In the century and a half since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, we still are stymied by the complexity of the biosphere, and, just as with our financial systems, our efforts to intervene have often led to confounding results.

There is thus a recursive, reflexive loop at the heart of the economy.4 Complexity economics asks how this loop drives the behavior of the system over time, i.e., how will the pattern of the system today shape individual decisions which will then collectively create the pattern of the system tomorrow.