I look forward to a time when the biologists stop berating the physicists for abandoning reductionism. At the moment, the biologists are strongly and evangelically reductionistic, and any suggestion by physicists that one can deviate from the path of strict reductionism tends to evoke a rap over the knuckles from the biologists. My personal belief is that biologists tend to be uncompromising and reductionistic because they're still feeling somewhat insecure with their basic dogma, whereas physicists have three hundred years of secure foundation for their subject, so they can afford to be a bit more freewheeling in their speculation about these complex systems. I hope to see this cultural division between these two communities dissolve away within the next ten to twenty years, so that they'll be able to talk to each other in the same language. In the science of complexity, it's essential to recognize that there is this second path.
Complexity amounts to more than mere complication.
It's more than just a large number of simple systems coming together in conjunction. Complex systems really do have their own laws and principles, and their own internal logic. In the next few decades, physics will be going in the direction of complexity. Stephen Hawking said, in his famous 1979 address on his inauguration to the Lucasian Chair, that the end might be in sight for theoretical physics, by which he meant that the end of this reductionist program might be in sight. That would still leave this path of complexity, this synthetic or holistic way of looking at the world.