Many other properties are specific, bones, legs, intelligence for example appear only in certain instances. This contrast between the universal and the specific distinguishes complexity thought from that of conventional disciplines. Normal academic fields are very specific, their findings are only applicable within that field and often only to very small areas of it. A divide and conquer approach is used to the world by science, along with the assumption that a finding in, say, astronomy will be of no earthly use in biology. All fields are thus assumed discrete.
Complexity theory takes the opposite approach.
Here we regard systems as systems regardless of how they are constituted. This new science can apply across all fields, covering systems in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and sociology and uses the same methodology and explanations for all of them. Surprisingly, we find, when we attempt this, that such generalisations are largely valid. But by getting together specialists from various disciplines to work as part of one team, complexity thinking is establishing for the first time a general science of the universe, a step as far beyond what has gone before as the advances of Newton and Einstein were to the sciences of their day.