I have read the book "Harnessing Complexity" as well, and was a bit disappointed. It is small and contains no interesting models. IMHO his classic books about "The Evolution of Cooperation" and "The Complexity of Cooperation" are much better. As you know, the first is about the iterated prisoner's dilemma, and in the second he presents the "Dissemination Model" which explains the emergence of culture through local convergence and global polarization, and his "Tribute Model" (for "building political actors") which captures some of the essential properties of power and tries to explain the origin of nations and empires. His agent based models are simple, but that's their beauty. The complexity should be in the results, not in the model itself.
-J. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Michael Agar Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2006 8:56 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unified Theory [...] I'm just reading Axelrod and Cohen's Harnessing Complexity, a book that means to introduce a broader audience who are thinking about organizations to complexity science. They organize the book in sections on variation, interaction and selection and do a nice job of introducing some of the differences that have to be included in a social and cultural millieu. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
