My search for the origin of complexity and complex systems has taken me back to the work of Herbert Simon and his 1969 book The Sciences of the Artificial.

It also led me further to Simon's 1962 essay The Architecture of Complexity, where he traces the history back to the idea of a general systems theory, like that of Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Simon writes...

A NUMBER of proposals have been advanced in recent years for the development of "general systems theory" which, abstracting from properties peculiar to physical, biological, or social systems, would be applicable to all of them. We might well feel that, while the goal is laudable, systems of such diverse kinds could hardly be expected to have any nontrivial properties in common. Metaphor and analogy can be helpful, or they can be misleading. All depends on whether the similarities the metaphor captures are significant or superficial.

It may not be entirely vain, however, to search for common properties among diverse kinds of complex systems. The ideas that go by the name of cybernetics constitute, if not a theory, at least a point of view that has been proving fruitful over a wide range of application. It has been useful to look at the behavior of adaptive systems in terms of the concepts of feedback and homeostasis, and to analyze adaptiveness in terms of the theory of selective information. The ideas of feedback and information provide a frame of reference for viewing a wide range of situations, just as do the ideas of evolution, of relativism, of axiomatic method, and of operationalism.

In this paper I should like to report on some things we have been learning about particular kinds of complex systems encountered in the behavioral sciences.

In 1977 the Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel prize for investigating the irreversibility of processes in complex physical systems far from equilibrium conditions.

These are physical or chemical systems far from equilibrium conditions that appear to develop "order out of chaos" and look to be "self-organizing." Like biological systems, matter and energy (of low entropy) flows through the "dissipative" structure. It is primarily free energy and negative entropy that is "dissipated."

This similarity to biological systems (in just one very important thermodynamic respect) was exploited by Prigogine to say he had discovered "new laws of nature" that could connect the natural sciences to the human sciences. Dissipation also implies irreversibility, a very important characteristic of life.

Prigogine had no physical explanation for irreversibility - beyond the fact that his physical "dissipative structures" and biological systems - exhibited it. He generally attacked classical Newtonian dynamics as being time reversible and thus providing no understanding of time. His understanding of time was based on the work of Henri Bergson and the uneven flow of time Bergson called "duration."

The Nobel committee wrote...

The great contribution of Prigogine to thermodynamic theory in his successful extension of it to systems which are far from thermodynamic equilibrium. This is extremely interesting as large differences compared to conditions close to equilibrium had to be expected. Prigogine has demonstrated that a new form of ordered structures can exist under such conditions, and he has given them the name ''dissipative structures" to stress that they only exist in conjunction with their environment.

(Press Release on the 1977 Nobel Prize )

Prigogine is perhaps the most famous name in chaos theory and complexity theory. Although he made very few original contributions to these fields, he is famous for them, nevertheless. His work (especially his 1984 book written with Isabel Stengers, Order Out Of Chaos) is a major reference today for popular concepts like "self-organizing, "complex systems," "bifurcation points," "non-linearity,", "attractors," "symmetry breaking," "morphogenesis," "autocatalytic," "constraint," and of course "irreversibility," although none of these terms is originally Prigogine's. The name "dissipative structures" and perhaps the phrase "far from equilibrium" belong to Prigogine, but the thermodynamic concepts were already in Boltzmann, Bertalanffy, and Schrödinger, and perhaps many others.

In 1984 the Santa Fe Institute was founded by Los Alamos scientists George A Cowan, Murray Gell-Mann, and others. See this history.

Cowan also recounts the history in his 2010 book Manhattan Project to the Santa Fe Institute and this hour-long video interview

The Santa Fe Institute became famous for their studies of complexity and complex systems. Their mission is "Searching for Order in the Complexity of Evolving Worlds" and they write...

What is Complex Systems Science?

Complexity arises in any system in which many agents interact and adapt to one another and their environments. Examples of these complex systems include the nervous system, the Internet, ecosystems, economies, cities, and civilizations. As individual agents interact and adapt within these systems, evolutionary processes and often surprising "emergent" behaviors arise at the macro level. Complexity science attempts to find common mechanisms that lead to complexity in nominally distinct physical, biological, social, and technological systems

The Santa Fe Institute took a turn toward theology (and teleology) at a 1999 conference at Santa Fe organized by Paul Davies, who had just four years earlier won a $1-million Templeton Prize. Significantly, Sir John Templeton attended the 1999 conference personally.

Presentations at the conference were reported in the 2003 book From Complexity to Life, edited by theologian Niels Hendrick Gregersen. It included papers by Davies, Charles Bennett, Gregory Chaitin, Stuart Kauffman, Werner Loewenstein, and Harold Morowitz. One paper was by William Dembski, the major proponent of Intelligent Design.

In 2010 Davies and Gregersen jointly edited the book Information and the Nature of Reality, which was a report on a 2006 conference in Copenhagen that included several important writers on complex systems, including Terrence Deacon, Jesper Hoffmeyer, Seth Lloyd, and Henry Stapp, as well as several prominent Christian theologians.