Islands of Order: A Guide to Complexity Modeling for the Social Sciences

Description

Two pioneering anthropologists reveal how complexity science can help us better understand how societies change over time Over the past two decades, anthropologist J. Stephen Lansing and geneticist Murray Cox have explored dozens of villages on the islands of the Malay Archipelago, combining ethnographic research with research into genetic and l

J. Stephen Lansing is Director of the Complexity Institute and Professor in the Asian School of the Environment at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His books include Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali (Princeton). Murray P. Cox is Professor of Computational Biology at Massey University in New Zealand.

"A major achievement. The breadth and depth of this brilliant book, from rich ethnography to elaborate agent-based models, are awe inspiring and standard setting."-Scott E. Page, author of The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy "This exceptional book is chock-full of ideas that can inspire a new generation of researchers in the study of human societies using the framework of complex systems."-Mark Moritz, Ohio State University