What geek wouldn’t be attracted to a book covering subjects ranging from Slashdot and Sim City to Alan Turing, Gerald Edelman, ant colonies and neuroscience? In this book Steven Johnson touches on all of these topics and more to provide an insightful and educational introduction to the science of emergence.
Emergence is a phenomenon in complex systems where the behaviours of individual components (ants in a colony, cars in a traffic jam, etc) unwittingly contribute to higher-level behaviours in the system itself. These higher-level behaviours appear so structured and patterned that we often think they’re caused by conscious, centrally directed planning – but more often than not, this is far from the truth.
Johnson looks at emergence from a wide range of perspectives. He manages to relate the longer-term behavioural patterns of ant colonies to the patterns cities can sustain over centuries or even millennia. He shows how computer games like Sim City demonstrate basic similarities to biological systems such as slime mould. And, using Slashdot as an example, he discusses how successful online communities manage to incorporate the same sorts of phatic communication that help us handle life in large cities.
In doing so, Johnson brings together an eclectic bibliography which is expanded upon in more detail in the book’s notes. The sources come from a wide range of fields not just because emergence is a widely applicable model, but also because it’s a comparatively new science, so there isn’t much in the way of specialised literature yet. This is a good thing for readers like me who are profoundly unlikely to be able to grasp specialised material. But at the same time it contributes to the book’s nodal value: if you want to read something that will lead you on to further education and discovery, Emergence and its bibliography will not disappoint.
At the same time, however – and this might be a curse of popular science books in general – Emergence seems to lose its sense of direction in the latter third, in which Johnson talks about anti-globalisation movements and devices like the TiVo but doesn’t connect them convincingly to the book’s main theme. These sections still interest me, however: the book was first published in 2001 and I love now-commonplace things being described when they were still shiny and new. This is the new retro-futurism!
For me, Emergence has served as a genuine introduction to a new field of thought and – at risk of sounding corny – a new way of looking at the world. It’s caused my “want list” of new books to expand dramatically and into unexpected areas. It’s probable that, over time, I’ll look back on this book as being one of a few that have had a genuine and profound effect on me, even if only because of the other books and writers it has pointed me towards. This is the sort of thing popular science books should aspire to.
