Although it’s in many senses brand new, its roots are also very old, going back at least as far as Aristotle, 2,400 years ago. (For some historical development of it in philosophy and biology, see Emergent Evolution: Qualitative Novelty and the Levels of Reality, David Blitz, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992.) It’s growing now because our computers have finally grown strong enough for us to use them to see macroscale patterns that were too big for us to see before. It’s also growing now because we finally know enough to realize that understanding how the parts of a complex network interact is just as important as understanding the parts themselves. And it’s growing now that we realize that an entomologist studying termites may have something to say to a molecular biologist studying mitochondria, who may have something to say to a climatologist studying tornadoes, who may have something to say to a sociologist studying city planning. Emergence: From Chaos to Order, John Holland, Perseus Books Group, 1999. Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity, John Holland, Addison-Wesley, 1996.

It’s still a magpie of a science. It steals ideas from condensed matter physics, biochemistry, molecular biology, embryology, entomology, ecology, evolutionary theory, neuroscience, mathematics, and economics. It feathers its nest with that hodge-podge of ideas, trying to find what’s common among them. It’s hoping to answer just one central question: how does order arise out of chaos? It assumes that there’s similarity of origin regardless of whether that order is in cities or crayfish or economies or railway companies. It’s still flailing around in the dark, but the vague outlines of a coherent theory may not be far off. And that theory, if proven true, may one day imply testable things about our future. However, today even the very definition of the word ‘complex’ is unresolved. We don’t yet have a widely accepted way to measure the ‘complexity’ of a system. So we still don’t have a uniform definition of a ‘complex system.’ So it’s still far from a real science. Hierarchical Structures and Scaling in Physics, Remo Badii and Antonio Politi, Cambridge University Press, 1997. “Quantifying Self-Organization with Optimal Predictors,” C. R. Shalizi, K. L. Shalizi, R. Haslinger, Physical Review Letters, 93(11):118701, 2004.

Our knowledge is now growing so fast that every new field goes through the same cycle. First a few explorers find something of interest. Then there’s a feeding frenzy as many prospectors join the gold rush. After a while, interest wanes as the same prospectors see that the pot of gold is still distant. That speed-up is a side-effect of our growing knowledge base, but the cycle itself is very old. It doesn’t much matter whether it’s in mining or science, finance or the stock market. We all behave exactly the same way, everywhere and everywhen. In the last century that cycle has played out in systems theory, cybernetics, information theory, game theory, catastrophe theory, fractal geometry, and chaos theory. It’s now playing out in complex systems. Each wave washes up some new and pretty shell on the shoreline of our knowledge, but it’s hard to build those shells into a coherent picture. Too much is still missing.

Today, Columbus’ original log is lost, but in 1514 Bartolome de Las Casas summarized it on his first visit to Cuba. On Tuesday, 6th November, 1492, Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres returned from an exploration in Cuba noting that, “The land is very fertile and is cultivated with yams and several kinds of beans different from ours, as well as corn.” From “Journal of the First Voyage of Columbus,” The Northmen, Columbus, and Cabot, 985-1503, Original Narratives of Early American History, Julius E. Olson and Edward Gaylord Bourne (editors), Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906, page 142. For Europeans in North America, maize came to be called ‘Indian corn,’ then simply ‘corn.’ In 1539, Garcilaso de la Vega, part of Hernan de Soto’s expedition in northern Florida and the Carolinas, wrote that, “[We] marched on through some great fields of corn, beans, and squash and other vegetables which had been sown on both sides of the road and were spread out as far as the eye could see across two leagues of plain.” The Florida of the Inca, John and Jeannette Varner (translators and editors), University of Texas Press, 1988.

When we think of hunter-gatherers today, we often imagine a few cold and small tribes. They’re dressed in roughcut hides and they’re wandering lost through desolate, virgin, landscapes. That’s the picture that even serious movies and books typically give us. But that picture may be completely wrong. We had a lot of time on our hands back then and we weren’t stupid. So perhaps we were actually wearing well-tailored clothes with lots of ornaments and tattoos and bodypaint—literally dressed to kill. All that would’ve vanished over the millennia. We may also have carved totems of our passing into every rock face, hillside, riverbank, and tree that we camped nearby, like dogs marking our territory. Over the millennia, such unsheltered signs would’ve weathered away, leaving only the few remains of cave art today. Adorning ourselves or adorning our territory, both may have helped us keep the peace.

Another bitter winter followed. The Baltic iced over and ships froze in place. That spring, torrential rains returned, turning roads to mires and waterways to rivers, further blocking food transport. In Hungary, the Danube, the principal transport corridor for continental Europe, flooded, washing away fields and villages. The sporadic war between France and Flanders, ongoing since 1297, worsened the crisis as armies stole draft animals and added banditry to their list of job skills. Europe began to fall apart. Peasants stumbled across the countryside, begging for food. The urban poor, unable to forage, suffered even more—or so say the chroniclers, but then most of them lived in towns. As among the cattle, disease then spread, killing rich and poor alike. Robbery and murder increased. So did food riots. In war-torn regions like Ireland and the Scottish border, graveyards were reportedly mined for fresh corpses. Corpses of the hanged were apparently cut down from their gibbets and eaten. Jailed convicts ceased to be fed and allegedly ate new prisoners alive. Families were said to eat their dead. Many chronicles even speak of parents killing their children for food.

Jordan estimates 30 million for the affected European population, with three million dead in the first three years. The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century, William Chester Jordan, Princeton University Press, 1996. Livi-Bacci, though, estimates that Europe as a whole contained that many as far back as the year 1000. However, although Livi-Bacci estimates 74 million for all Europe, it is for 1340 not 1314, and may include parts of Europe not visited by the 1314 famine. A Concise History of World Population, Massimo Livi-Bacci, translated by Carl Ipsen, Third Revision, Blackwell, 1997.

As for its effect, here’s a small illustration. The Vikings, perhaps reacting to warming weather starting around 800, colonized Greenland in 986. But with cooling weather starting up again in 1250, those colonies lasted until no later than 1412. In 1492, the year Columbus first crossed the Atlantic, the pope complained that because of the ice no bishop had visited Greenland for 84 years. He didn’t know it, but his Greenland flock probably was already dead. No written records survive, but their skeletons reflect the worsening climate, declining in height from about 1.76 meters (five feet nine and a half inches) in the 980s to about 1.6 meters (five feet four and a half inches) by the 1440s. The oxygen isotope ratios in their teeth tell a story of sharply falling temperatures from 1100 to 1450. A ship driven off-course in 1540 found no one alive and one dead man, frozen where he fell. “Climate and history: the Westvikings’ saga,” J. and M. Gribbin, New Scientist, 125:52-55, 20 January 1990. “Oxygen isotope composition of human tooth enamel from medieval Greenland; linking climate and society,” H. C. Fricke, J. R. O’Neil, N. Lynnerup, Geology, 23(10):869-872, 1995.

More comprehensively, Angel integrated a vast amount of skeletal data from sites in Greece and Turkey stretching all the way from paleolithic times to the near present. In all that time, the Little Ice Age period, from about 1300 to about 1700, stands out as one of several long declines. “Health as a Crucial Factor in the Changes from Hunting to Developed Farming in the Eastern Mediterranean,” J. L. Angel, In Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture, Mark N. Cohen and George J. Armelagos (editors), Academic Press, 1984, pages 51-74.

Most transgenic plants are grown in the United States (about 66 percent), Argentina (23 percent), Canada (6 percent) and China (4 percent). Global Status of Commercialized Transgenic Crops: 2002: Preview, Clive James, ISAAA Briefs Number 27, 2002, The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications, ISAAA SEAsiaCenter, c/o IRRI, DAPO Box 7777, Metro Manila, The Philippines. (Note: ISAAA is a lobby, funded by Monsato and other big agribusiness companies. As such, readers should be careful with their reported data on worldwide transgenic uptake.)

Since plants can’t run away, millions of years before we started meddling with them they protected themselves from being eaten by lacing their bodies with all sorts of poisons: antibiotics, fungicides, insecticides, and herbicides—from which we made nearly all of our earliest poisons, perfumes, medicines, and spices.

Today, our perception of risk from our food is severely distorted. Each day, the average American, for example, eats about 10,000 times more plant-generated pesticides than artificial ones. One gram of roasted coffee, for instance, contains about 59 milligrams of chlorogenic acid, neochlorogenic acid, caffeic acid, and caffeine—all toxins, and all put there by the coffee plant, not us. (However, artificial pesticides are still undesirable because being sprayed on, not built-in, they run off easily and collect in aquifers.) Cooking our food adds further toxicity by producing about two grams per person per day of burnt material that contains many rodent carcinogens: polycyclic hydrocarbons, heterocyclic amines, furfural, nitrosamines, and nitroaromatics, as well as many mutagens. Further, many plant toxins are cumulative. Potatoes, for example, contain fat-soluble neurotoxins detectable in the bloodstream of all potato eaters. Potatoes are relatively new to our species, so our genes haven’t yet had time to evolve ways to fully detoxify them.

We don’t drop dead (usually) when we drink coffee and eat some potato chips because all plant-eaters have evolved ways to detect harmful plants and avoid them, or have evolved ways to detoxify a few plant poisons. In our case, we’ve selectively amplified only those few plant cultivars and those ways of preparing food from them that haven’t immediately killed us in the past. For example, cassava (a starchy tuber like the potato and the chief component of tapioca) feeds over 400 million of us in the tropics, but it also contains cyanide. We’ve learned, presumably by long trial and error, how to boil it to reduce the poison to trace amounts. Rhubarb leaves, apple seeds, almonds, lima beans, potato skins, avocado skins, cherry pits—even too much nutmeg in your eggnog—all can kill. “What Do Animal Cancer Tests Tell Us About Human Cancer Risk?: Overview of Analyses of the Carcinogenic Potency Database,” L. Swirsky Gold, T. H. Slone, B. N. Ames, Drug Metabolism Reviews, 30(2):359-404, 1998. “Rodent Carcinogens: Setting Priorities,” L. Swirsky Gold, T. H. Slone, B. R. Stern, N. B. Manley, B. N. Ames, Science, 258(5080):261-265, 1992.

Various chemists, faced with mountains of now nearly worthless calcium carbine in both Europe and the United States, then tried various things. In 1903, two German dyers, Adolph Frank and Nikodem Caro, ran nitrogen over hot calcium carbide, accidentally producing calcium cyanamide, the world’s first artificial fertilizer. They did that not to produce fertilizer but to produce cyanides to help extract gold from its ores (which is sodium cyanide’s chief use today). They formed a company to do precisely that, the Deutsche Gold- und Silber-Scheideanstalt vormals Roessler, now called Degussa, AG. In 1905, two more German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, developed a completely different, high-pressure way to make sodium nitrate, also a fertilizer. The Frank-Caro process initially nearly destroyed them commercially, though, since it was initially cheaper. Then, during World War I, Germany turned back to the Haber-Bosch process, but not to make fertilizers—to make explosives. The Chemical Industry During the Nineteenth Century. A Study of the Economic Aspect of Applied Chemistry in Europe and North America, Ludwig F. Haber, Clarendon Press, 1958. The Chemical Industry: 1900-1930, International Growth and Technological Change, Ludwig F. Haber, Clarendon Press, 1971.

The story is even longer, stranger, and more involved than this brief note suggests, containing many more blind alleys and unexpected twists and turns, and altering the politics of many nations, including Germany, France, Britain, Chile, and the United States. Not to mention the consequences of guano, gaslight, the electric light, welding, steel, explosives, poison gas, hydroelectrics, liquid oxygen, the dynamo, famine, the Nazis, and both world wars. Someone should write a book about this. It should be told to every schoolchild as their very first lesson that the world doesn’t work anything like they’ve been told.

City life was always attractive, but it used to be that cities were very bad places to live, at least in terms of mortality rates. City disease killed us faster than we could reproduce and only continual replenishment from the countryside let them persist. Today, though, urban mortality rates are better than rural mortality rates. Urban dwellers also have different opportunities and different consumption patterns than rural dwellers. Regardless of income level, urban dwellers have fewer kids, eat more and better food, and consume more energy and durable goods. Of course, all that demand has environmental costs as well. “Consumption Patterns: The Driving Force of Environmental Stress,” J. K. Parikh, S. Gokam, J. P. Painuly, B. Saha, V. Shukla, The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, 1991. “Impact of Trends in Resources, Environment and Development on Demographic Prospects,” N. Keyfitz, in Population and Resources in a Changing World, Kingsley Davis, Mikhail S. Bernstam, and Helen M. Sellers (editors), Stanford University Press, 1989.

Given a choice today, we flee the countryside because urban prospects for income, education, medical care, and services (like entertainment) are higher. Urban mortality is lower, and urban fertility is much lower. Over 40 percent of our urban growth since 1960 has not been because of increasing urban birth rates but via flight from rural to urban areas. “Fertility and Family Planning in African Cities: The Impact of Female Migration,” M. Brockerhoff, Journal of Biosocial Science, 27(3):347-358, 1995. “People Who Move: New Reproductive Health Focus,” R. Gardner, R. Blackburn, Population Reports, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Population Information Program, 24(3):1-27, 1996.

Here are a few more examples. From 1769 to 1771, a famine in British-ruled Bengal killed one in three of us there; perhaps 10 millon people died. The usual cannibalism followed. The government response? They raised taxes. The Annals of Rural Bengal, Volume I, The Ethnical Frontier of Lower Bengal, with the Ancient Principalities of Beerbhoom and Bishenpore, W. W. Hunter, Smith, Elder, and Co., 1868, pages 19-48. What should have been an equally bad famine occurred in roughly the place in 1866 (mainly in Orissa, but also Bengal), yet only one million died. The railroad and abandonment of a government ban on speculation in food made the difference. However, a much wider famine, affecting not only Bengal but much of the rest of India, occurred in 1896, once again killing millions. The Famine of 1896-1897 in Bengal: Availability or Entitlement Crisis?” Malabika Chakrabarti, Orient Longman, 2004.

From 1846 to 1852, a potato blight in Ireland helped kill over a million of us. (The figure of one million deaths is widely reported, although it’s only estimated since mortality records weren’t kept in Ireland until 1864.) We let whole villages be swept away by starvation, cholera, typhus, and politics. A Death Dealing Famine: the Great Hunger in Ireland, Christine Kinealy, Pluto Press, 1997. Major famine was nothing new to Ireland, though. For instance, about a century earlier, in 1741, about 300,000 had died, perhaps 13 percent of the population, or about one in seven or eight people.

From 1943 to 1945, heavy rains destroyed part of Bengal’s rice crop. Although its rice supply was still a million tons higher than it had been in 1941, between 3.5 and 3.8 million of us, mostly kids, died. We killed them with patchy infrastructure, profiteering, hoarding, denial, disease, disinterest, and politics. Poverty and Famines: an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Amartya Sen, Oxford University Press, 1981.

Today, despite having more food globally than all of us alive need, we let famine continue in the horn of Africa—particularly Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, and Djibouti. We’re still trapped in a mirrored hall of political desire. Ignorance, disinterest, shortsightedness, power-hunger, and wishful thinking let us see only what we wish to see. It doesn’t matter how powerful our technology becomes if we choose not to use it.

William the Conqueror, too, is often alleged to have banned slavery in Britain after the conquest in 1066, but what he actually did was the same that any other European ruler did—he banned export slavery of English slaves (maybe because he didn’t get a cut on those sales?). It’s also often reported that various religious leaders, Saint Wulfstan or Anslem or Archbishop Lanfranc or Saint Patrick, for example, ended slavery in England—or even Europe as a whole. Not so. There were occasional admonitions, for example, after the (first) invasion of Ireland by English barons in the 1160s, but at most they lead to a reduction in Christian export slavery. In short: in Europe, it was ok to have slaves, it was ok for them to be Christian, it was ok to export slaves, too. The European abolition effort in medieval times was primarily about the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands.

Finally, it’s often stated that even if Christianity itself accepted slavery that after the Protestant Reformation it died out in Europe because of the new Protestant zeal. It’s true that it mostly did die out after the Reformation, and it’s true that Puritans, in particular, who were themselves badly treated, were more against slavery than normal, but it’s also true that many still kept slaves. William Penn, for example, a Quaker, who also owned Pennsylvania, was both a slave holder and a slave trader. England didn’t make slavery on English soil illegal until 1796 (not 1772 as is often reported; the James Somerset case in 1772 prevented slave recapture in England, but the idea of slaves as property was only overturned in 1796). Nor was English slavery particularly special within Europe. For example, thanks to their longships, the Vikings earlier took Norse, Saxon, Irish, Gallic, Italian, and Slav slaves from all over Europe and sold them to other Europeans, to the Muslims, and to each other. Also, from the eighth century on, North Africans—from Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli, known at the time as the Barbary coast—took slaves in England and Ireland for centuries, as well as slaves all over the North Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, from Iceland to Palestine—including Miguel de Cervantes, who was enslaved off the Catalan coast on September 26th, 1575, 30 years before he wrote Don Quixote.

Speaking of the Irish reduction in a letter to John Thurloe, the Secretary of State, Henry Cromwell, fourth son of Oliver Cromwell, and commander of the English troops in Ireland, wrote, “It was a measure beneficial to Ireland, which was thus relieved of a population that might trouble the [English] planters; it was a benefit to the people removed, which might thus be made English and Christians... a great benefit to the West India sugar planters, who desired men and boys for their bondsmen, and the women and Irish girls in a country where they had only Maroon women and Negresses to solace them.” Whence the ‘Black Irish’ of Jamaica, Joseph J. Williams, The Dial Press, 1932, pages 10-11. (Note: Spelling modernized.)

In 1655, Henry Cromwell was asked for 1,000 Irish girls of breedable age, who were to be sent to comfort 1,500 troops about to be sent to newly conquered Jamaica. In a letter dated September 11th, 1655, he wrote that, “[A]lthough we must use force in taking them up, yet it beinge so much for their owne goode and likely to be of soe great advantage to the publique, it is not in the least doubted you may have such number of them as you thinke fitt to make use upon this account.” A week later, September 18th, he wrote again, “I shall not neede to repeat anythinge about the girles, not doubtinge but to answer your expectations to the full in that; and I think it might be of like advantage to your affairs there, and to ours heer, if you should thinke it fitt to send 1500 or 2000 young boys of from twelve to fourteen years of age, to the place aforementioned.” The troops, and their new possessions, set sail from Galway the next month, bound for Jamaica. The Cromwell letters are preserved in Secretary Thurloe’s correspondence, Volume IV. The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, John P. Prendergast, McGlashan and Gill, Second Edition, 1875, pages 92-93. Hell or Connaught! The Cromwellian Colonisation of Ireland 1652-1660, Peter Beresford Ellis, Hamish Hamiton Ltd., 1975, pages 148-149.

English theft of Irish bodies for colonial use started at least by 1612 and continued until at least 1700; it was then outlawed—partly because England’s colonial labor demand grew so strong that slave-takers began indiscriminately stealing English settlers in Ireland as well. Not that the English had serious qualms about enslaving each other: after a failed rebellion in Somersetshire in 1685, 841 were enslaved and shipped to the Caribbean and Virginia. English, Scottish, and Irish rebellions in 1715 and 1745 and 1798 were put down the same way.

Earlier, the Irish had stolen English bodies too. While Rome still ruled Britain, sometime in the late fourth century an Irish flotilla enslaved thousands, including the roughly 16 year-old Maewyn Succat (‘Victorius’), the British-born Roman citizen who would later rename himself Patricius (‘Well-born’) and be remembered as Saint Patrick.