The newest generation of systems theory, variously referred to as the complexity sciences, complex adaptive systems, or nonequilibrium theory, has among its central themes the ubiquity of far-from-equilibrium systems and the resulting limitations in their predictability.
By contrast Hayek's diverse and ruminative output on business cycles, money, economic ignorance, liberty, social evolution, the human mind, economic methodology, the character of social science, complexity theory threatens to engulf readers before they start.
This involves the application of a set of integrative foundational elements drawn from urban planning, urban design, sustainability, sustainable development, sustainability science, data science, computer science, complexity science, systems theory, systems thinking, and ICT.
Fourth, the formalism anchors modular imperative agent-based models, and their associated CASs, within the algorithmic hierarchy of traditional computer science complexity theory.
But, even leaving aside these narrower considerations, ecology provides ample opportunity to illuminate general questions about many of the traditional themes of the philosophy of science: complexity, contingency, holism, lawlikeness, reductionism, representation, etc.
It incorporates systems science, complexity, and chaos theories.
You can answer all of these questions without resorting to the sciences of complexity and self-organization, but those answers all share a common pattern, as clear as the whorls of a fingerprint.
In any event, increasingly the tools developed for the "sciences of complexity" and being deployed to develop better models of living systems (Depew & Weber 1995; Kauffman 2000).
Whether the existing sciences of complexity are sufficient or a newer conceptual framework is needed remains to be seen (Harold 2001).
Just a generation later, with an awareness based on the still newer sciences of complexity and chaos, we no longer talk about "The Future": We have had to learn the language of possible Futures.
