"This discussion of how complexity pervade biology presents an intriguing view on relationships between
math and science� The topic sounds challenging but is actually fairly easy to understand in Richard Sole and Brian
Goodwin's Signs of Life."
--Bookwatch
"Signs of Life has ants and stockmarkets, cells and mass extinction. All life is here, its story told by
two of the most brilliant and engaging researchers in the rapidly emerging science of complexity."
--Stuart Pimm, author of The Balance of Nature
Perseus Books Group Web Site, August, 2003
Summary
In every major field of biology, from molecular genetics and neurobiology, through animal behavior and ecology,
to evolution, extinction, and economics, there are well-known phenomena that today's standard theories are powerless
to explain: Why don't cells in identical environments with identical genomes live identical lives? How do such
simple creatures as ants and termites manage such complex behavior as building nests? Why did all the animal kingdom's
basic body plans appear in a single geological era, and no new ones since? Yet, as Ricard Sole and Brian Goodwin
show, various tools of complexity theory can offer us new ways to understand these phenomena. A tour of biology
such as you've never seen before, Signs of Life is about explaining the unexplainable -- by using new ideas
to answer questions yesterday's ideas can't help us with.
