John Henry Holland

Then, in 1984, a group of scientists from physics, economics, biology, mathematics, computer science, and other disciplines created the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico specifically to study these kinds of problems across disciplinary boundaries.

People like physicist Murray Gell-Mann, biologist and computer scientist John Holland, and theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman began asking whether there were common principles that could help explain systems as different ecosystems, economies, immune systems, cities, and human societies.

Holland, in particular, became closely associated with the idea of the complex adaptive system, and that word adaptive is important because this is where the distinction between something that is merely complicated and something that is complex becomes relevant.

Take an airplane.