
When I reviewed Underbug a couple of weeks ago, I supposed many readers would enjoy the storytelling skill of author and journalist Lisa Margonelli even though I was hoping for more science. Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell has plenty of math and science, which is fine by me yet may not be to everyone’s taste. As it happens, the subjects of both books overlap; the complexity of termite mounds is one stop on Mitchell’s tour. Notably, neither book offers a compelling conclusion to the search for unifying principles that generate complexity; just defining the term in a quantifiably useful way continues to elude complexity scientists. Margonelli and Mitchell agree that we are still waiting for Carnot.
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