Heather Z. Brooks, Michelle Feng, Mason A. Porter, and Alexandria Volkening

The spread of memes and misinformation on social media, political redistricting, gentrification in urban communities, pedestrian movement in crowds, and the dynamics of voters are among the many social phenomena that researchers investigate in the field of complex systems. In the study of complex social systems, there is often also societal relevance to improving our understanding of how individuals interact with each other and their environment, giving rise to collective group dynamics.

The mathematical and computational study of complex social systems relies on and motivates the development of methods in many topics, including mathematical modeling, data analysis, network science, and topology and geometry. This volume is a collection of diverse articles about complex social systems. This collection includes both (1) survey and tutorial articles that introduce complex social systems and methods to study them and (2) manuscripts with original research that highlight a variety of mathematical areas and applications.

This book introduces the study of complex social systems to a broad mathematical audience. It will particularly appeal to people who are interested in applied mathematics.

Read the full article at: www.ams.org

Carl Zimmer

For generations, physicists have puzzled over life. Their theories about matter and energy have helped them understand how the universe produced galaxies and planets. But physicists have struggled to understand how lifeless chemical reactions give rise to the complexity stored in our cells.

In a new book, “Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence,” out on Aug. 6, Sara Walker, a physicist at Arizona State University, offers a theory that she and her colleagues believe can make sense of life. Assembly theory, as they call it, looks at everything in the universe in terms of how it was assembled from smaller parts. Life, the scientists argue, emerges when the universe hits on a way to make exceptionally intricate things.

The book arrives at an opportune time, as assembly theory has attracted both praise and criticism in recent months. Dr. Walker argues that the theory holds the potential to help identify life on other worlds. And it may allow scientists like her to create life from scratch.

“I actually think alien life will be discovered in the lab first,” Dr. Walker said in an interview.

Read the full article at: www.nytimes.com

Hector Zenil

Sara Walker’s Life as no one knows it arrives on the heels of extensive media coverage and promotional efforts that have catapulted it into bestseller status. I approached this book with a sense of anticipation, especially eager to explore her ideas on algorithmic probability and open-endedness–topics we briefly worked on together [1]. These areas of research are foundational to understanding life’s complexity and origins, and I had expected Walker’s book to delve into these subjects with depth and originality.

However, the book surprised me for other reasons–and unfortunately, not in a positive way. Rather than presenting her own work, much of the book focuses on the ideas of Leroy (Lee) Cronin, a chemist whose assembly theory (AT) has met with significant skepticism and criticism in the scientific community. The central thesis of AT is that the ability of life to make numerous copies of itself–or to utilize multiple copies of the resources it requires–is the defining feature of living systems. This concept, quantified through an “assembly index,” proposes that life’s complexity can be reduced to the mere counting of these copies. Note that it has been considered and disproven many times.

Cronin’s theory specifically has been disproven by multiple research groups [2,3,4], and the scientific merit of its approaches remains highly questionable. Walker, rather than scrutinizing or distancing herself from these ideas, devotes much of her book to promoting them without acknowledging the criticisms and counter-evidence.

Read the full article at: www.computingreviews.com

This book presents an innovative framework for conceptualising families as complex systems and for understanding and supporting positive change, adaptation and resilience. The development of this framework was based on a qualitative and abductive research process targeting change and resilience processes in multi-challenged families.

The theoretical novelty of this book is mostly expressed in the notion of Love-Force: a relational force emerging from the coupling processes between individuals with potential transformative effects on them, their interactions and environments. This book introduces a new vocabulary for understanding the complexity of families as complex systems and their change and resilience processes. Love-Force is presented as a supreme expression of the complexity of families and human bonds. It elaborates on the complexity of the family bonds, on the relation of Love-Force to change and resilience and its contributions to the conceptualisation of the Potential for Family Change.

Raising important theoretical and methodological challenges and questions, it presents a guide for future interdisciplinary research in the domains of complexity and family sciences and advances in practice. As such, it will be of interest to anyone interested in the complexity of human relations and to complexity scientists as much as family theorists, researchers and practitioners.

More at: www.routledge.com

Provides an unifying approach to the study of statistical laws
Starts from simple examples and goes through more advanced time-series and statistical methods
Presents the necessary material to analyze, test, and interpret results in existing and new datasets

Read the full article at: link.springer.com