Linked
I just finished an interesting book - Linked. It’s all about the science of networks. It begins nice. This guy argues again Reductionism. He says that western science had this notion that the best way to study something is to take it apart, study the bits, and then understand how everything is built. It might work on a radio or a telephone. But it doesn’t work on the human body or other complex things. Yeah - we know about atoms and molecules - but it doesn’t help us understand how our bodies function. I like this kind of thinking - that’s part of what’s wrong with modern western medicine as compared to more ‘holistic’ methods.
Anyway, so he says we need to study networks. The book deals with several models for networks, going through several interesting examples - the internet routing network, the WWW, living cells, terrorist networks, movie-actors network, and more.
But overall it was rather disappointing - because I’m not sure if I really did learn anything ‘useful’. It feels like this ’science’ is in rather early stages so they don’t have anything exciting to say. Yet.