Jonas Salk & Bruce J. West - Complexity, organization and uncertainty (1987)


Abstract


We discuss a strategy for understanding some of the observed relationships between complexity, organization, and uncertainty. The approach is phenomenological and emphasizes the basically discontinuous, irregular, and uncertain aspects of sociobiological systems. Much of the discussion is motivated by the observed inverse power-laws that arise in a great many data sets, e.g. Lotka's law in sociology, Pareto's law in economics, and Zipf's law in linguistics, and concludes that even the simplest of sociobiological systems elude the deterministic description of the physical sciences. It is conjectured that the clustering property implicit in such power-law behaviour may capture a ‘deep’ property of sociobiological systems, including perhaps the observed intermittency in speciation.