Required Textbooks:

James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1987.
Steven Levy, Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology,
New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization
and Complexity, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity, New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994.

Internet Resources:

idisw21a@calvin.edu ­ All members of the class are subscribed to this email list. I intend to use it to make class announcements, adjustments to assignments, answer questions, and carry on discussion. It is not intended to be just for instructor to class communication, but will also serve as class to class communication. If you have not yet begun to use your email account at Calvin, now is the time to begin. (I can help you get started if you need it.)

http://chemistry.calvin.edu/chemistry/idisw21/index.html ­ This is the World Wide Web (WWW) home page for this course. You can access it using a web browser such as Netscape Navigator from any Macintosh or IBM compatible desktop computer that has internet access. Here you will find all course materials (including this handout), a pictorial class list with email addresses and links to personal home pages, an archive of our email discussions, links to resources related to complexity and chaos, links to final project reports, etc.

Course Description: A new way of thinking about the world around us is emerging. Disciplines as far afield as physics, biochemistry, evolutionary biology, psychology, economics, and cultural anthropology are touched by this new way of thinking. It has even found its way into popular culture in Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and The Lost World. Under the rubric of complexity and chaos theory, ideas such as cellular automata, genetic algorithms, neural networks, self-organized criticality, emergent properties, strange attractors, fractals, and slogans such as "life wants to happen" and "order for free" are being used to explain all sorts of heretofore unexplained phenomena such as the origin of life, biological evolution, human consciousness, cultural evolution, and economic systems. This course is an exploration of the popular literature on this subject through a number of recently published books such as James Gleick's Chaos, Steven Levy's Artificial Life, Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe, and Mitch Waldrop's Complexity. The course also examines how a Christian perspective on chaos and complexity might look. There are many easy to use computer programs and internet accessible resources available in this subject area that are used to supplement readings, discussion, and lectures. Each student does a special project that could be a research paper for the more general student or a more technical project involving some application of complexity theory to the student's own major discipline, perhaps involving computer programming.

Philosophy of Interim: The interim term at Calvin is a time to explore. Without the pressure of other courses or of grades, you can investigate a topic more thoroughly and tailored to your own personal interests. The project in IDIS W21 allows for this sort of customization. You will get out of the course what you want. If you want to coast along and do as little work as possible, you can probably still get an S in the course. Of course, you can also pour yourself into the course gain much. Interim is also a time for instructors to stretch and explore new areas. I am not an expert in complexity and chaos theory. I've read several popular science level books (including the ones assigned) and am intrigued by the possibilities of applications in my own area of research (protein folding). I hope to learn as much this interim as you do. So don't count on me as the expert who can answer all your questions. We're in this together. Class Format: Each day 80-120 pages of reading will be assigned. The following day the reading material will be reviewed via a video or mini-lecture, in class demonstration of computer programs, discussion, and hands on use of programs demonstrated in class. Grading will depend significantly upon class participation. In addition to this typical routine there will be four additional activities: 1) a group project where students search the internet for resources relating to complexity and chaos theory and prepare a web page of links to these resources; 2) a midterm exam (a matching test where people and terms are matched with short phrases); 3) a daily journal where the students record questions on the readings and questions/reflections on implications of complexity and chaos theory for the Christian faith; 4) a final project that will have both a written and an oral component.

Grading: Do everything reasonably well for an S. Less than that gets a U.

Terms and People Related to Complexity and Chaos Theory

(Note: This is not an exhaustive list, but primarily derived from the textbooks for this course.)

chaos strange attractors fractal
Lorenz attractor Mandelbrot set Mitch Feigenbaum
Edward Lorenz James Yorke Robert May
logistic equation Benoit Mandelbrot Koch snowflake
Sierpinski carpet Sierpinski gasket butterfly effect
John von Neumann Alan Turing Turing machine
cellular automata game of life John Conway
Stephen Wolfram Norman Packard Craig Reynolds
boids Doyne Farmer Chris Langton
emergent behavior artificial life Stuart Kauffman
self-organization auto-catalytic network "life wants to happen"
genetic algorithm Richard Dawkins biomorph
Danny Hillis Ramps Thomas Ray
Tierra Boolean networks NK landscapes
self-organized criticality power law Per Bak
Brian Goodwin D'Arcy Thompson neural network
Santa Fe Institute vants