NONFICTION - June 26, 1994

COMPLEXIFICATION: Explaining a Paradoxical World Through the Science of Surprise by John L. Casti (HarperCollins; $24; 320 pp.). For two centuries, cyberneticist W. Ross Ashby observed in 1956, science “has been exploring systems that are either intrinsically simple or that are capable of being analyzed into simple components.” Science, in other words, had tended to limit itself to investigating phenomena to which the scientific method lent itself . . . meaning that many of the complexities of the world were simply overlooked, if not mangled on a Procrustean bed. Ashby’s remark lies at the heart of “Complexification,” for John Casti, a fellow of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, here lays out some of the groundwork for the study of deeply complex systems, systems that defy all efforts to reduce them to their component parts. Like Douglas Hofstadter’s “Goedel, Escher, Bach,” James Gleick’s “Chaos,” and Casti’s own “Searching for Certainty,” “Complexification” can be very difficult to understand, but this is one case where confusion should not be laid at the author’s feet; Casti is a lucid writer, and compelling even when the reader--this reader, at least--comprehends only the basic thrust of an argument. In discussing such things as strange attractors, algorithm programs, Mandelbrot sets and catastrophe theory, Casti goes a long way toward demonstrating, as he notes in the book’s final pages, “the limits of reductionism as a universal problem-solving approach.”