It takes a village to raise a talk A couple of weeks ago I was asked to give a talk on complexity and Daoism and the light they shed on how to engage with what feels like our ever-more precarious future. I sat on the train and sorted…
Dangerous miracle: A natural history of antibiotics Co-evolution of nature, science and economics The history of antibiotics gives some great examples of how the ‘path taken’ is shaped by the coming together of disparate and sometimes quirky conditions and events and requirements, which then create the conditions…
Small data, big task Song-Chun Zhu, in the field of Artificial Intelligence, is taking a strikingly different stance from the prevailing paradigm in the US, reports Chang Che in The Guardian Weekly (26 September 2025). He argues that a sign of true intelligence is…
news and events I’ve had a busy and interesting summer, including a fair bit of down time and travel. One of the very positive outcomes of writing The Dao of Complexity is the new connections I make and the new avenues that open…
Regathering Last weekend I took part in ‘Regathering’ – an event held deep in a wood just north of Bath. Think yurts, compost loos with a view, outdoor cooking, roundhouse for meetings, yoga – as well as connection, sharing of ideas,…
Deleuze and the sounds of silence “The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves… but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.” Gilles Deleuze This quote was shared recently by Shahzad Tabassum in a Facebook post, and…
Becoming ourselves If the science of complexity, the science of open systems, gives a picture of the functioning of complex webs of inter-relating ‘things’, then we can expect this science to offer a perspective from the smallest to the largest scale. Individual…
Daoism and personal practice I am part of a meditation group and this morning I was asked to start us off with a few words about Daoism – its central tenets from my perspective. This five minute recording , rather tentative, summarises two linked…
Challenging the inevitability of self-interest I went to a talk last Saturday in Oxford, given by Ben Ansell, author of Why Politics Fails’. It worried me. One central issue – and I challenged him on this – is his assumption that Man always acts in…
Laissez-faire economics, mechanical thinking, open systems The world is still in the grip of worldviews driven by two classical – and outdated – physics theories. One, the mechanical worldview, is based on the work of Isaac Newton. Newton essentially was focused on two questions: how the…
On knowing How can we explore the complex world? If the world is complex, then ‘knowing’ that world is best approached with methods that reflect that complexity and capture its contextual, path-dependent, patterned nature.…
The path is made through walking Peter Allen used to unsettle people back in the day by asserting that there is more than one future. I am not quite sure why people found this so upsetting other than it is another recognition of the limits to…
