I'm Richard Monastersky, a reporter here at The Chronicle. Our guest today is Stuart Kauffman, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and founder of Bios Group, a complexity consulting company. Unfortunately, there's no single definition of complexity. Seth Lloyd, now at MIT, when he was at the Santa Fe Institute, once listed 32 different definitions of complexity, Nevertheless, colloquially, and for myself, complexity involves systems with a large number of interacting parts, where the way the parts effect each other differs from part to part. The genetic regulatory networks in cells would be an example.
Chaos theory is a subset of complexity theory.
Complexity theory typically deals with systems with hundreds or thousands of interacting parts and tries to understand the collective emergent properties of the dynamical behavior of such systems. Mathematical models of genetic regulatory networks or immune networks, or the behavior of the stock market, are typical examples. Any thoughts or suggestions on sources, methods and readings to introduce complexity theory to liberal arts undergrads, esp. There are several good books that are introductions to complexity theory. Two books called Complexity, one by Mitch Waldrop, and the other by Roger Lewin, are both fine introductions to complexity and the Santa Fe Institute.