A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A VOICE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT TOP 25 FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR AN ESQUIRE MAGAZINE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR In the tradition of Being Digital and The Tipping Point, Steven Johnson, acclaimed as a "cultural critic with a poet's heart" (The Village Voice), takes readers on an eye-opening journey through emergence theory and its applicati...(展开全部)

It is fast becoming clear that our lives revolve around the powers of emergence. Order arrives from the bottom-up, not top-down. Complexity is resolved through simplicity. Everywhere the same laws are obeyed, the same swarm logic is at work. "Emergence" looks at the cities we inhabit, the media frenzies we suffer and the games we play, showing how individual actions without cen...(展开全部)

In a sunlit clearing in central Gondwana, on an otherwise ordinary day in the late Cretaceous, the seeds of Earth's first and greatest civilization were sown in the grisly aftermath of a Tyrannosaurus' lunch. Throughout the universe, intelligence is a rare and fragile commodity – a fleeting glimmer in the long night of cosmic history. That Earth should harbour not just one but ...(展开全部)

The social sciences have sophisticated models of choice and equilibrium but little understanding of the emergence of novelty. Where do new alternatives, new organizational forms, and new types of people come from? Combining biochemical insights about the origin of life with innovative and historically oriented social network analyses, John Padgett and Walter Powell develop a t...(展开全部)

From the Arctic to South Africa - one finds them everywhere: Ants. Making up nearly 15% of the entire terrestrial animal biomass, ants are impressive not only in quantitative terms, they also fascinate by their highly organized and complex social system. Their caste system, the division of labor, the origin of altruistic behavior and the complex forms of chemical communication ...(展开全部)

This landmark work, the distillation of a lifetime of research by the world's leading myrmecologists, is a thoroughgoing survey of one of the largest and most diverse groups of animals on the planet. Handouml; lldobler and Wilson review in exhaustive detail virtually all topics in the anatomy, physiology, social organization, ecology, and natural history of the ants. In large f...(展开全部)

Your colleague's husband's sister can make you fat, even if you don't know her. A happy neighbor has more impact on your happiness than a happy spouse. These startling revelations of how much we truly influence one another are revealed in the studies of Drs. Christakis and Fowler, which have repeatedly made front-page news nationwide. In CONNECTED, the authors explain why emoti...(展开全部)

Your colleague's husband's sister can make you fat, even if you don't know her. A happy neighbor has more impact on your happiness than a happy spouse. These startling revelations of how much we truly influence one another are revealed in the studies of Drs. Christakis and Fowler, which have repeatedly made front-page news nationwide. In CONNECTED, the authors explain why emoti...(展开全部)