Complexity and Adaptability in Nature and Society

This chapter deals with the issues related to the complexity and adaptability of human to nature. What is complexity in a complex world? Seven concepts/properties of complexity are presented. The world created by humans demands of itself changes of posture relative to its adaptation, without this, the planet Earth does not seem to be a friendly environment to live. Thus the science of complexity is necessary to make everyday relations, once marked by simplicity, occur without trauma, since they are necessarily complex. What does it take to adapt to the world of complexity? Coping with disruptions, defending from attacks, resolving conflicts, correcting drift into failure, and avoiding stagnation. Necessary tools for adapting the technology for designing complexity into organizations, processes and products references are presented: architecture, multi-agent software works, organizational, and process design cases, engineering design cases, etc. It is not known how the future will be, but certainly complexity will be one of its characteristics.

Keywords: Complexity, Adaptability, Nature, Society, Brain.