The world is excited these days about the burgeoning concept of Complexity. It isn't consumed with the topic in the conceptual sense ... contemporary issues about economics, politics, techno-gadgetry, environment, and the latest entertainment events (sports and arts) win the day when it comes to that.
But behind the scenes (played out in popular publications and magazine/news articles that reveal the sub-tabula propoganda struggle for notoriety and scientific provenance), there is ego-jockeying for who will be the next Copernicus, Newton, Jefferson, Edison, Carver, Curie, Einstein, Gandhi, Confucious of the scientific 21st Century. Complexity is touted as the panacea concept to potentially solve the world's physical ills. But at the moment it stands like the Monolith in Arthur Clarke's "2001: A Space Oddysey", with most of the scientific and economic community gathered around it in obvious excitement, seeing it, pointing to it, jumping up and down in vocal agitation, approaching it for brief touches, cognizant that it's something special and intuiting certain characteristics, yet not really comprehending its "innards".
Well, yours truly is not immune to participating in the spectacle. Since my earliest days I made the topic the cause celebré of my life, quite before it was dubbed with the name "complexity". My concern back then was the question, "How does biology arise out of physics which seems to have quite different operating rules?". For good or ill, I worked in a self-imposed isolation. Not unaccessible with the general academic world pursuing the topic, but merely distanced from commitment to the accepted Guild Path of academic degrees. And, for good or ill, my exposure and dissemination of ideas has been limited by that primal decision.
The past 12 months has seen quite a turn from that anonymity. Modestly but significantly. And now the next plateau has been reached, requiring undiverted confrontation with competing ideas... the principle competition being the leading popular theory: Autocatalysis (Kauffman,1993). I won't go into rebuttals here as I've done that elsewhere (including I/CI Bulletin #002). I will however promote some pragmatic work done by a recent Nobel Prize winner. He was honored for empirical contributions in the field of Chemistry, which were obvious for their importance in very practical areas, complying with the wishes of Alfred Nobel when he created the awards.
But the work has deeper and broader significance. It is a detailed physics description of Complexity that totally by-passes autocatalysis. I need to frame my perception of autocatalysis for you for a moment by saying that autocatalysis has a limited validity ... and I would never suggest that the model be thrown out, because it does have some residual merit and interpretive applications. But the work by Rudolph Marcus on the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems is a seminal example of how local interacting entropy sets produce and enact complexity at the atomic level ... the real mechanism of Complexity building ... counter to autocatalyis, and counter to "stability far from equilibrium" (Prigogine, 1972).
I caution you, this is my interpretation. I take full responsibility for the correlation and for promoting it as such, until such a time as it gains widespread recognition and acceptance.
The I/CI Intra-site created for Prof.Marcus presents Nobel material, his writings, autobiographical sketch and my discussions re "electron transfer reactions" , "integrity" and "complexity". , June 1998.
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