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Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity and the Emergence of Life (Hardcover)
by John Gribbin (Author)

(5 customer reviews)

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Product details

Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Allen Lane (29 Jan 2004)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0713996102
ISBN-13: 978-0713996104
Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.6 x 3 cm

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(5 customer reviews)

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 374,144 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

the Daily Telegraph, February 14, 2004
'Exhilarating... Gribbin uses a step-by-step historical method to ground contemporary thought in classical physics'

the Sunday Times, February 15, 2004
'Gribbin...takes us through the basics of all this with his customary talent for accessibility and clarity'

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

A Curate's Egg of a Book, 31 Aug 2006

By	Sw Foster (Maidstone, UK) - See all my reviews

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