What is Complexity? - The philosophy of complexity per se with application to some examples in evolution

1 Introduction

The label of "complexity" often performs much the same role as that of the name of a desirable residential area in Estate Agent's advertisements. It is applied to many items beyond the original area but which are still somewhere in the vicinity. It thus helps in the item's promotion by ensuring that a sufficient number of people will enquire into the details, but this does not mean that this wider use is ideal if you want to perform a more precise analysis. In this paper I concentrate on the use of complexity as a tool for analysis. I hope to clarify the concept and thus make it a more useful tool in the analysis of evolution and its effect on the evolved.

In Section 2, I will discuss the broad use of complexity as a paradigm for new approaches to intractable systems; in Section 3, I will discuss the useful scope of the idea of complexity; in Section 4, I will try to clear some of the surrounding clutter of associated concepts paving the way to a definition in Section 5. Then the relation of this definition to some other definitions used in the field are discussed in Section 6, followed by the application of the definition to broader questions concerning the connection of complexity and evolution in Section 7.

Some of the ideas contained here have been at least partially expressed elsewhere, but not brought together in this form. To credit all of them would make the paper very unwieldy, for some surveys of the field see [4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 23, 13, 28, 29].

What is Complexity? - The philosophy of complexity per se with application to some examples in evolution - 14 JUN 95

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