Book: Signs of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology
By Taivo Lints on Monday 19 November 2007, 17:23 - Permalink
A book by Ricard V. Solé and Brian C. Goodwin, originally from year 2000.
The cover gives an impression that the book is a discussion about what life is, but this is not the case. Instead, it is a good and relatively easy to read overview of a large number of tools and approaches that are often referred to as complexity science. There are deterministic chaos, emergence, criticality, self-organization, patterns in excitable media, entropy, Ising model, information theory, renormalization, self-similarity, sand-pile model, metabolic networks, genetic networks, cell differentiation, reaction-diffusion systems, biological clocks, neural nets, phase transitions, ant colonies, nest building in social insects, biodiversity, ecological stability, viral quasispecies, catalytic chemical networks, evolution and extinction, stock market fluctuations, urban growth, traffic models, etc.
As the page count is around 300, the book obviously doesn't go into great details of every concept, neither does it always have all terminology explained, neither is there a coherent overarching story. Thus I don't know if it would be a good reading for somebody who has never heard most of the presented ideas before, but for me it is a good collection of notes that can be used for sparking inspiration and for quickly remembering the key concepts, the details of which should then be looked up from other sources. So, in general I like it.
More information at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465019285/
and if you have access to Wiley InterScience, then: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/97519452/