We have captured our creator, evolution, and we have embodied it in our machines. Just as natural selection merged with genetics in the modern synthesis , we are now combining evolution with computers in, what might similarly be called the postmodern synthesis . We have breathed qualities of life into our artifacts as computation . On the brink of a new millennium, we would do well to reconsider the domain and quality of the of mental, discursive and mathematical models we have customarily utilized in the social sciences. The authors provide us with compelling reasons to do so.
Science moves neither smoothly nor evenly.
Like technology, both ongoing parts of culture, it shares with its biological base analogs to punctuated equilibria and to mosaic evolution . Social science is still heavily invested in more traditional modes of explanation and although a thoroughly informed anthropological study of the coevolution of ecologies of various models among researchers in differing environments would be extraordinarily useful, glimpses of what it might reveal remain only vague subtexts in the authors' work. Computer science is now in its fiftieth year, and it has provided us with languages that enable us to speak clearly about complexity and analyze it. This has never happened before in human evolution. I share their hope that others will soon follow, individually creating ensembles of tenable artificial societies from which we can begin to explore the potential risks, costs and benefits of competing social policies, present, future and past.