Rating: 
Summary: Interesting ideas, bad writing
Review: The ideas presented in this book by John Holland are no doubt interestring. The thought of spontaneous self-organization though hardly new has intrigued humans for centuries. Intuitively it makes sense and appeals to most peoples physical and methaphysical sensibilities. We know and hope that there is more to life than our common sense knowledge of it and the often dull and mechanistic accounts of natural science. Emergence theory therefore has an immediate appeal. Holland manages to keep this "flame" alive for one chapter (the first one) then the wholle enterprise is drowned in techno babble and most "non-hacker" readers are bored and dissappointed. This book is one more instance of a genuinly interesting idea being mercilessly slaughtered by bad writing. It's a true waste. It makes you wish writing courses were made compulsory for natural scientists and techo folks. Unfortunatelly it is hard to reckommend a better book on this subject... Most of the existing books are either written by litterary incompetent but hard core techno devotees or by soft science writers ruminating the self evident and riding the tidal wave of hype. All for the buck and a snapshot in the spotlight. A non-trivial sign of an over-hyped field of inquiry, dangerously bordering the realms of pseudoscience. At least chaos theory had Edward Lorenz as a respectable and astute front figure, managing to keep the delicate balance between scientific integrity and popular appeal. As for emergence theory that post is still vacant. Holland may be an important contributor to the field of emergence theory but he fails the requirements for that post.
Rating: 
Summary: Not there yet
Review: This is a fascinating readable book. Dr Holland shows us many interesting behavioural models with fascinating results. His Echo model and genetic model results are particularly interesting, and insightful.Still, it seems to me, models based on atomistic concepts and the law of large numbers ought to be subjected to performance measurements based on thermodynamics. Dr. Holland has not shown that these complex adaptive systems imitate nature better than a similar model based on, for example, oxidation-reduction. Following the ideas of Arthur S Iberall I believe a theory of complex adaptive systems needs to be evaluated in terms of Navier-Stokes equations.
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