Excerpt

Any paper that elucidates a core concept in any field, especially a developing one, belongs on a list of must-reads for any scholar in that field. Herbert Simon’s “The Architecture of Complexity” (1962) checks not one such box but four, interweaving notions of complexity, hierarchy, modularity, and near-decomposability in discussing the evolution and self-organization of complex systems.

Simon wrote his paper just as interest in general systems theory was beginning to accelerate. The Society for General Systems Research, today called the International Society for the Systems Sciences, formally began in 1955 as a truly cross-disciplinary forum, encompassing the physical, biological, and social sciences. Simon was clearly intrigued but cautious, writing, “We might well feel that, while the goal is laudable, systems of such diverse kinds could hardly be expected to have any nontrivial properties in common. Metaphor and analogy can be helpful, or they can be misleading. All depends on whether the similarities the metaphor captures are significant or superficial.” He then goes on to extract some truly significant similarities that go well beyond metaphor. The distinction Simon makes is equally relevant today, as scientists move from one discipline to another, at times satisfying themselves with superficiality, at times deriving true progress by demonstrating the insights possible from cross-disciplinary perspectives, and at times exploring the interconnected nature, for example, of biological and social systems.

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