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Modularity: Understanding the Development and Evolution of Natural Complex Systems (Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology)
from: The MIT Press
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 576.8
EAN: 9780262033268
ISBN: 0262033267
Label: The MIT Press
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 471
Publication Date: June 01, 2005
Publisher: The MIT Press
Studio: The MIT Press
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Editorial Review:
Modularity—the attempt to understand systems as integrations of partially independent and interacting units—is today a dominant theme in the life sciences, cognitive science, and computer science. The concept goes back at least implicitly to the Scientific (or Copernican) Revolution, and can be found behind later theories of phrenology, physiology, and genetics; moreover, art, engineering, and mathematics rely on modular design principles. This collection broadens the scientific discussion of modularity by bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, including artificial life, cognitive science, economics, evolutionary computation, developmental and evolutionary biology, linguistics, mathematics, morphology, paleontology, physics, theoretical chemistry, philosophy, and the arts.
The contributors debate and compare the uses of modularity, discussing the different disciplinary contexts of "modular thinking" in general (including hierarchical organization, near-decomposability, quasi-independence, and recursion) or of more specialized concepts (including character complex, gene family, encapsulation, and mosaic evolution); what modules are, why and how they develop and evolve, and the implication for the research agenda in the disciplines involved; and how to bring about useful cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer on the topic. The book includes a foreword by the late Herbert A. Simon addressing the role of near-decomposability in understanding complex systems.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Too Modular
This is a very interesting book. Or at least, it's a book about a cluster of very interesting topics, and occasionally contains interesting insights about these topics.
The problem is that the book is a bit too modular - the chapters don't work very well together. Every author seems to have his own concept of modularity. As several of the chapters are primarily concerned with defining modularity, this could be taken to be a good thing, but it isn't. The simple reason is that many of ... Read More
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