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Science and Complexity

Warren Weaver. 2004. “Science and Complexity.” E:CO 6 (3): 65–74.

Science has led to a multitude of results that affect men’s lives. Some of these results are embodied in mere conveniences of a relatively trivial sort. Many of them, based on science and developed through technology, are essential to the machinery of modern life. Many other results, especially those associated with the biological and medical sciences, are of unquestioned benefit and comfort. Certain aspects of science have profoundly influenced men’s ideas and even their ideals. Still other aspects of science are thoroughly awesome.

Reading level: Basic


Warren Weaver may be best known as the co-author, with Claude Shannon, of The Mathematical Theory of Communication in 1949. But for me, his original 1948 American Scientist article Science and Complexity is equally important.

Weaver described and discussed three types of problems, which he called problems of simplicity, disorganized complexity and organized complexity. In contemporary terms, we describe these as deterministic, random and complex respectively.

His key point in 1948 was that while science had made great progress in understanding deterministic behaviors using classical methods, and understanding large-scale random behaviors using statistics, we had barely scratched the surface in applying scientific methods to complex behaviors.

One is tempted to oversimplify and say that scientific methodology went from one extreme to the other – from two variables to an astronomical number – and left untouched a great middle region. The importance of this middle region, moreover, does not depend primarily on the fact that the number of variables involved is moderate… The really important characteristic of the problems in this middle region, which science has yet little explored or conquered, lies in the fact that these problems, as contrasted with the disorganized situations with which statistics can cope, show the essential feature of organization. In fact, one can refer to this group of problems as those of organized complexity.”

Weaver went on to encourage scientists to approach complex problems using inter-disciplinary and computer-based approaches, which were innovations arising out of wartime activities by scientists. “Science has, to date, succeeded in solving a bewildering number of relatively easy problems, whereas the hard problems, and the ones which perhaps promise most for man’s future, lie ahead.”

One of the key points I take from Science and Complexity is a hopeful stance for the social sciences. Weaver describes how it took several centuries for the life sciences to adopt the highly quantitative and analytic character of the physical sciences. We are now seeing the benefit of such maturation in fields like neuroscience. My hope is that the social sciences will similarly make a transition towards embracing complexity. Perhaps it is time for another Warren Weaver to come along and set the tone in a new paper called “Social Science and Complexity”.