Indeed it is hard to imagine how science could exist if they didn't. The idea that the world exists in a linear, ordered state is comfortable and allows complicated ideas to be understood in their simplest expression. The idea that living systems restructure themselves is very important to the relationship between rhetorical invention and chaos. The ability of systems to spontaneously restructure themselves is what causes systems in chaos to emerge with a new order about them. The system that crosses the line between equilibrium and disequilibrium is in chaos and it is complexity theory that allows chaotic systems, those that are in disequilibrium, to seek and find a new order.
Complexity gives systems the capacity to self-order themselves.
It is this complex process that lies at the foundation if complexity theory. Complexity exists where chaotic systems, those that structure themselves based on the influences around them, and linear systems, those that theoretically resist outside influences, intermingle. As other links have pointed out, the learner who is filled with knowledge that is provided by a teacher lacks the developmental processes that will make that information part of the associative structure of the learners brain. If a connection is made, it is to the entire information set and not to the information as part of the learners knowledge base. As a result of the encapsulation of a set of information, the learner can only access this set if the route is remembered.