While death may be one of life’s most predictable surprises, it has also proved itself to be one of the most fascinating and cutting-edge areas of scientific inquiry. Our bodies and lives tell a story of cellular creation and destruction that can be traced back to Earth’s primordial oceans. Yet when we follow the interwoven thread of beginnings and endings in an effort to discover death’s origins, nature, and meaning, we find that we cannot settle on a single definition of death or even a single interpretation of it. It would seem that there is not one death, but an endless variety of forms, each of which raises further questions about how well we understand death’s counterpoint—life.

Using death as a connecting theme, in Endless Endings, Ricard Solé explores the differing meanings of death in varied forms, reflecting on questions that are pushing forward the frontiers of scientific understanding. What is the physical basis of inevitable decay? Can we manipulate cellular rules to avoid death? What does death mean if life occurs inside a computer? Can a conscious machine save itself from death? Is immortality possible? What does it mean for language, thought, or information to die? As Solé reveals, life’s endings can be just as fascinating and varied as life itself.

More at: press.princeton.edu

Business today remains tethered to a paradigm that is long out of date. This mindset assumes that universal answers exist: Businesses can simply apply compartmentalized operations and follow linear paths to success. Experienced managers know business doesn’t work this way. Where should they turn?
In this groundbreaking book, Doug Garnett shows how complexity science reveals a new understanding of how business works that is as useful on the front lines as in the C-suite. This discipline—the study of behaviors in highly interconnected, adapting systems dominated by emergence—is revolutionizing fields from biology and economics to psychology and artificial intelligence. Recognizing a business as a complex adaptive system operating within other complex systems changes our perspective on everything from core concepts of demand, profit, and strategy to the nature of business success. Managers who grasp the order hidden within complexity discover not only a powerful new understanding of their role but also potential for dramatic contributions to success.
The Complexity Paradigm features vivid examples ranging from local coffee shops to major corporations like PepsiCo, Boeing, Mattel, Starbucks, and General Motors as well as tech giants such as Apple and AT&T. Grounding eye-opening theory in the realities of business, this foundational look at complexity offers deep insight and value for practitioners and students alike.

More at: cup.columbia.edu

Collective action has been a fundamental aspect of human societies throughout history, from building irrigation systems and defenses in Neolithic times to coordinated disaster relief and scientific collaborations today. In this book, Sergey Gavrilets explains when and why groups of people cooperate, presenting a quantitative framework that unifies game theory with models of social influence, cognition, and individual and cultural variation. He shows how humans’ deep susceptibility to social influence—grounded in evolutionary need to cooperate and learn from peers, reinforced by deference to parents and elders, and extended to cultural, religious, and political leaders—shapes norms, beliefs, and collective outcomes.

Integrating previously separate literatures, Gavrilets introduces explicit dynamics for norms and beliefs, quantifies the effects of individual and cultural differences, and tests predictions across societies. Drawing on formal, data-based mathematical modeling supported by behavioral experiments and studies of online behavior, he concludes that successful collective action depends on six interacting forces: material payoffs, personal norms and attitudes, social influence, cognition, evolving social norms and beliefs about others, and individual and cultural differences. Lasting cultural change, he argues, depends on norms and institutions that shape behavior through persuasion, nudging, and enforcement. Gavrilets translates this theory into practical, testable strategies for policy and design, including targeted messaging, dynamic norms, and culturally sensitive approaches, and connects it to broader theories of behavior change.

More at: press.princeton.edu

This book offers a unique perspective on the evolution of scientific theories through the lens of their changing complexity.

To explore this non-trivial connection, the author draws on well-known historical cases from the philosophy of science tradition to test the central theses of the work. At the same time, the book develops a conceptual framework in which the debates on emergence and complexity play a central role.

The opening chapter provides the historical background of emergence, examining both classical and contemporary perspectives, highlighting diverse viewpoints and their contributions to the current discussion.

The second chapter turns to the foundations of complexity science, detailing its key methodologies and emphasizing the role of information in describing and modeling systems.

Building on this foundation, the book introduces a novel quantitative definition of emergent properties, grounded in the concept of parametric model complexity. It discusses how slight variations in control parameters can generate universal features and explores the implications of these dynamics for our understanding of systemic behavior.

Finally, the author shows how this framework illuminates critical aspects of scientific practice, ranging from the criteria guiding theory choice to the relationship between technological innovation and the risk of the appearance of anomalies. By combining historical analysis, conceptual innovation, and formal modeling, the book presents a compelling vision of how complexity and emergence can be predictive indicators of theoretical transformation, recognizing the moments when our current models have reached their limits.

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Cristian Axenie , Meisam Akbarzadeh , Michail A. Makridis , Matteo Saveriano , Alexandru Stancu

The book purpose is to build a foundational knowledge base by applying antifragile system design, analysis, and development in technical systems, with a focus on traffic engineering, robotics, and control engineering. The authors are interested in formalizing principles and an apparatus that turns the basic concept of antifragility into a tool for designing and building closed-loop technical systems that behave beyond robust in the face of uncertainty.

As coined in the book of Nassim Taleb, antifragility is a property of a system to gain from uncertainty, randomness, and volatility, opposite to what fragility would incur. An antifragile system’s response to external perturbations is beyond robust, such that small stressors can strengthen the future response of the system by adding a strong anticipation component. The work of the Applied Antifragility Group in traffic control and robotics, led by the authors, provides a good overview on the current research status.

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This book brings together key findings, insights, and theories at the intersection of two disciplines – city science and complex systems. It features a curated collection of chapters contributed by emerging scholars conducting cutting-edge research in complexity science, interdisciplinary physics, and quantitative geography. The compendium is tailored to a thematically diverse audience, spanning quantitative fields such as statistical and mathematical physics, as well as socially-focused domains such as geography and urban planning. By integrating novel methods and insights from physics, economics, and geography, this book aims at an interdisciplinary spectrum of graduate students and academic researchers studying cities as complex systems.

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In the tradition of classics such as The Lives of a Cell, a bold reframing of our relationship with technology that is more positive and human centered.
In the digital world, code is the essential primary building block, the equivalent of the cell or DNA in the biological sphere—and almost as mysterious. Code can create entire worlds, real and virtual; it allows us to connect instantly to people and places around the globe; and it performs tasks that were once only possible in science fiction. It is a superpower, and not just in a technical sense. It is also a gateway to ideas. As vividly illustrated by Samuel Arbesman, it is the ultimate connector, providing new insight and meaning into how everything from language and mythology to biblical texts, biology, and even our patterns of thought connect with the history and nature of computing.

While the building block of code can be used for many wondrous things it can also create deeper wedges in our society and be weaponized to cause damage to our planet or our civilization. Code and computing are too important to be left to the tech community; it is essential that each of us engage with it. And we fail to understand it to our detriment.

By providing us with a framework to think about coding and its effects upon the world and placing the past, current, and future developments in computing into its broader setting we see how software and computers can work for people as opposed to against our needs. With this deeper understanding into the “why” of coding we can be masters of technology rather than its subjects.

More at: www.publicaffairsbooks.com

The contemporary global economy exhibits unprecedented structural complexity—characterized by nonlinear dynamics, adaptive behaviors, and emergent properties. Understanding these phenomena requires theoretical frameworks capable of addressing complexity, path dependence, and evolutionary processes.

Complexity economics has developed to address such intellectual challenges. Originating in a seminal 1987 Santa Fe Institute workshop and first described in The Economy as an Evolving Complex System (1988), this approach fundamentally reconceptualizes economic systems as complex adaptive systems. Subsequent volumes (1997, 2005) progressively developed this framework, offering new insights into finance, technological innovation, and social interactions.

Like each of its predecessors, this fourth volume is the product of an interdisciplinary workshop hosted at the Santa Fe Institute. It represents the latest synthesis, reflecting theoretical advances and methodological developments achieved over nearly four decades. Drawing on contributions from leading scholars worldwide, the chapters span foundational questions to policy applications—from agent-based modeling and network theory to macroeconomic dynamics, innovation systems, sustainability transitions, and inequality.

The result demonstrates complexity economics' capacity to generate novel insights into phenomena that remain puzzling within traditional frameworks: financial instability, technological disruption, climate economics, and institutional change. This volume positions complexity economics as an essential analytical framework for understanding twenty-first-century economic realities.

More at: www.sfipress.org

The scientific understanding of energy, matter, and spacetime has advanced rapidly, whereas the study of information—its properties, behavior, and dynamics—remains underdeveloped. Despite the complexity of knowledge and information, our conceptual and empirical grasp of its evolution lags significantly behind. Progress in disciplines such as artificial intelligence, genomics, cognitive science, cyber governance, global ecology, and quantum mechanics depends critically on a more rigorous understanding of information dynamics. Absent such insight, humanity risks succumbing to entropic forces that threaten systemic stability and long-term survival.

In this book, Klaus Jaffe addresses the limitations of prior treatments of infodynamics, many of which have been incomplete, imprecise, or conceptually flawed. It offers an interdisciplinary investigation into the relationship between information and energy, drawing on theoretical and empirical contributions from economics, biology, and physics. By challenging conventional paradigms, the book constructs a conceptual framework that bridges disparate scientific domains and societal processes. The resulting synthesis opens new avenues for empirical inquiry and policy-relevant research, with implications for both academic scholarship and public discourse.

Inviting readers to explore the evolving frontier of information science, the book highlights the role of information and its impact on both natural and social systems.

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* Explores the potential of complex systems in shaping the future of communication networks
* Integrates network science, bio-inspired models, artificial intelligence, and higher-order graph theory
* Provides a guide for researchers to use the full potential of complex systems in revolutionizing communication networks

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Cristian Axenie , Roman Bauer , Oliver López Corona , Jeffrey West

As coined in the book of Nassim Taleb, antifragility is a property of a system to gain from uncertainty, randomness, and volatility, opposite to what fragility would incur. An antifragile system’s response to external perturbations is beyond robust, such that small stressors can strengthen the future response of the system by adding a strong anticipation component. Such principles are already well suited for describing behaviors in natural systems but also in approaching therapy designs and eco-system modelling and eco-system analysis.

The purpose of this book is to build a foundational knowledge base by applying antifragile system design, analysis, and development in natural systems, including biomedicine, neuroscience, and ecology as main fields. We are interested in formalizing principles and an apparatus that turns the basic concept of antifragility into a tool for designing and building closed-loop systems that behave beyond robust in the face of uncertainty when characterizing and intervening in biomedical and ecological (eco)systems.

The book introduces the framework of applied antifragility and possible paths to build systems that gain from uncertainty. We draw from the body of literature on natural systems (e.g. cancer therapy, antibiotics, neuroscience, and agricultural pest management) in an attempt to unify the scales of antifragility in one framework. The work of the Applied Antifragility Group in oncology, neuroscience, and ecology led by the authors provides a good overview on the current research status.

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Interdisciplinary systems thinking is complementary but does not replace conventional disciplinary analytical thinking. The book is valuable for researchers, their advisors, and other thinkers interested in deep knowledge of science. Interdisciplinary systems thinking is valuable for three reasons: The goal of all science is a unified view of the world; we cannot solve the significant problems of our time without interdisciplinary collaboration; and general theories of systems and system archetypes support the solution to those problems. System archetypes are generic system models that have stood the test of time. As specialists within a discipline, we must be able to communicate between disciplines.
Interdisciplinary generalists can offer us reliable visions and relevant research problems. The goal of interdisciplinary research is to find unified solutions to those problems. The book provides a lot of information from over a thousand sources in a structured manner to help the reader. The book includes a comprehensive chronology, vocabulary, and bibliography. The author has been a research professor in information engineering for over 25 years. During his career, he became interested in systems thinking, which is closely related to the philosophy and history of science.

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