"Complexity" by Mitchell Waldrop is a book that explores the emerging field of complex systems and the scientists who are studying them. Here are the key points:

1. Complex systems are everywhere: From ecosystems to economies, from the brain to the internet, complex systems are all around us. These systems are made up of many interacting parts that can give rise to surprising, emergent behaviors.
2. Scientists are studying complex systems using a variety of tools: These include computer simulations, network theory, chaos theory, and more. By studying these systems, scientists hope to gain a better understanding of how they work and how to manage them.
3. Complex systems are inherently unpredictable: Because they are made up of many interacting parts, complex systems can exhibit behaviors that are difficult or impossible to predict. This makes it challenging to manage them, but it also means that they can exhibit surprising, creative behaviors.
4. Despite their unpredictability, complex systems can be managed: Through the use of feedback loops and other management techniques, complex systems can be guided towards desired outcomes. This requires a deep understanding of the system and a willingness to adapt and change as necessary.

Overall, "Complexity" is a fascinating exploration of the science of complex systems and the ways in which they are changing our understanding of the world around us.

• how can several quadrillion such molecules organise themselves into an entity that moves, that responds, that reproduces, that is alive?
• How do those billions of densely interconnected nerve cells inside our skulls give rise to feeling, thought, purpose, and awareness?
• Why is it that simple particles obeying simple rules will sometimes engage in the most astonishing, unpredictable behaviour?
• Somehow, the old categories of science were beginning to dissolve. Somehow, a new, unified science was out there waiting to be born.
• Instead of being a quest for the ultimate particles, it would be about flux, change, and the forming and dissolving of patters.
• Like it or not, the marketplace isn’t stable. The world isn’t stable. It’s full of evolution, upheaval, and surprise. Economics had to take that ferment into account.
• Increasing returns could be the foundation for a new and very different kind of economic science
• The quantitative engineering approach - the idea that human beings will respond to abstract economic incentives like machines - was highly limited at best. Economics, as any historian or anthropologist could have told him instantly, was hopelessly intertwined with politics and culture.
• Biology was as much a science as physics had ever been - that is messy, organic, non-mechanistic world was in fact governed by a handful of principles that were as deep and profound as Netwon’s laws of motion.
• At a molecular level, every living cell was astonishingly alike. The basic mechanisms were universal. And yet a tiny, almost undetectable mutation in the genetic blueprint might be enough to produce an enormous change in the organism as a whole.
• The real economy was not a machine but a king of living system, with all the spontaneity and complexity that Judson was showing him in the world of molecular biology.
• It’s conceivable that the economy is a self-organising system, in which market structures are spontaneously organised by such things as the demand for labor and the demand for goods and services
• Self-organisation depends upon self-reinforcement: a tendency for small effects to become magnified when conditions are right, instead of dying away.