The Symbiotic Man

Book excerpt: Within the past four decades a powerful scientific methodology has emerged that promises to dramatically recast our concept of nature and mankind's place in it. Unlike the traditional analytical approach which breaks nature down into smaller and smaller constituent parts, chaos theory, the theory of self-organization, and other so-called sciences of complexity, explore dynamic systems in their totalities, so as to lay bare the great constants governing their emergence, organization, and evolution. Using the tools of complexity, researchers recently have made breakthroughs in the understanding of such divers phenomena as weather systems, economies, and even the most daunting scientific mystery of all, the mind as an emergent property of the brain's dense neuronal mazes.