Quarks, electrons and neutrinos came flying out of that primal explosion and gradually condensed into matter. Our sun began like any other medium-sized star, and the Earth formed like many other planets. The story continues with life spontaneously emerging from the slime almost four billion years ago. It evolved through countless variations and extinctions until our ancestors strode the African savanna over 3 million years ago, and slowly acquired tools, language and culture. Now there is the story of Complexity.
Complexity is a new way of viewing the collective behavior of many simple but interacting parts.
The kind of part makes no difference, it could be an atom, molecule, neuron, morpheme, or even a computer bit. Complexity Theory deals with the potential evolutionary behavior of macroscopic collections of these parts. Their interactions lead to emergent properties, coherent collective phenomena that can only be described at levels higher than those of the individual units. For Complexity to emerge in a system two components are necessary. The first is Time , an irreversible medium where things can happen.