Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity and the Emergence of Life: Chaos Complexity and the Emergence of Life (Penguin Press Science) [Kindle Edition]

Gribbin writes in his introduction "..after about ten years of waiting for ...someone to write a book explaining (chaos theory) in language I could understand, I decided that if no one else was going to explain it in clear language, then I would have to." In one sense at least he achieves his goal - he really does make the mathematically complicated ideas that underpin complexity theory and chaos theory accessible to the general reader. The problem is however, that this has been done many times already by other authors, in a more interesting and lucid style. There are many books published that take the general reader from very simple introductions to much more advanced levels without the technical mathematics. So if you have not already read books by P. Davies, J. Gleik or S. Kaufmann and others then this may be a place to start. However, reader beware, because although Gribbin claims to have understood the concepts behind chaos and complexity he has certainly not grasped the implications that these ideas have for the sciences in general. This is evident in his chapters on earthquakes, extinctions and the facts of life. Here he is completely out of his depth as he struggles to interpret the patterns that emerge from the data using old fashioned approaches that have been made invalid by the material of the preceeding chapters. In short he can explain what chaos and complexity are about in mathematical terms - that is the easy bit, but he fails to show how these new ideas are causing a new scientific revolution.
In the chapter on the facts of life in particular his contrived arguments in support of neo-Darwinism simply cause one to ask if this is a really serious book. The mathematics of population genetics are linear in their construction, whereas the basis of chaos and complexity is non-linear mathematics. This is like comparing the surface of the moon (linear maths) with the surface of the Earth (non-linear maths): they are worlds apart. The former is dead and static, the latter is dynamic and constantly changing in unpredictable ways. It is here that we see the worst in a popular scientific writer - an author who has read about his subject but failed to grasp the implications of what he has read. What the new sciences tell us is that the natural world, including the one that Gribbin himself studies professionally - astronomy - will never be the same again. At last we can begin to understand life and evolution through real science, not a modified 18th and 19th century reworking of creationism and just-so story-telling. Similarly, the science taught at school and in some university courses is completely outmoded - fine for dealing with many relatively simple problems but not for the ones that really matter. Gribbin also fails to capture the excitement of these new discoveries because he fails to understand them, unlike the authors cited above.

This book provides another overview of the development of Chaos Theory and the background to fractals.

The scene set, the book then focuses on its chosen area of interest, the role of chaos in the development of life and its evolution. In particular it focuses on what it describes as activity at `the edge of chaos', the point where things begin to get interesting - where outcomes are deterministic, but not predictable. It is in this apparent paradox that the fascination of chaos lies.

Though the answer to the question where did life come from still sits a little out of reach of this book and our understanding, the picture created provides an overwhelming case for the presence and importance of chaos not simply in the construction of our world through the shaping of trees or river estuaries for example, but also in the operation of our world. Here we are not simply interested in the ways that trees grow or river estuaries form, but throughout the whole range of processes of how things work from the orbiting of the planets, to the frequencies of electrical interference on telephone lines.

Indeed Beniot Mandelbrot, one of chaos theory's pioneers, developed many of his ideas attempting to solve precisely this problem whilst employed at IBM, He concluded that interference was inevitable the solution was to detect corrupted data and resend.

Somewhat startlingly this same pattern of inevitability of unpredictable events can be seen throughout the operation of many of nature's processes. For example the frequency and severity of earthquakes follows the same fractal pattern, as does the pattern of craters on the moon, and thereby on the Earth. This is leading geologists and seismologists to profoundly rethink their understanding.

When we begin to appreciate the universality of these ideas, we realise that they are no less profound for the rest of us. The neatly ordered way in which we perceive cause and effect and attempt to apply this to complex systems has to be rethought.

The book explores how the effects of chaos permeate all aspects of the life of the universe, even to explaining, with deference to Rudyard Kipling, how the leopard gets its spots.

The consequences of chaos create a new way of seeing and demand a new way of understanding. For me they begin to solve the riddle, felt intuitively, that at the heart of the explanation of all of the complexity we experience, is simplicity, or as the book is titled, deep simplicity.
As Einstein said "When the solution is simple, God is answering."

This book provides a first step in this process.

John Gribbin does a brilliant job of pulling together different strands of science to come up with some startling conclusions about the origin of life and its place in the Universe. Just like his classsic Schrodinger's Cat, Deep Simplicity reviews a lot of stuff that you thought was familiar but hadn't really understood properly before. And his ultimate message is that while there may be no place for God in the Universe there is every chance of finding other life forms like ourselves. Who else could weave Newton, Poincare, Lovelock and Kaufman into one coherent story with sych a powerful message? Mind blowing.