ABSTRACT
The world’s complexity is a fact of life that has profound and far-reaching implications for us. Complexity is first and foremost a matter of the number and variety of an item’s constituent elements and of the elaborateness of their interrelational structure, be it organizational or operational. New resources for experimentation and observation continually bring greater ranges of phenomena to view thereby destabilizing the primarily oversimple account and introducing an ever greater complexity. Biologists are particularly attached to taxonomical complexity or heterogeneity of composition. J. T. Bonner, for example, has it that organic complexity is to be measured simply as the number of different cell types in an organism. Operational complexity is thus closely bound up with complexity of other sorts. In particular, the management of increasing constitutional complexity makes for new operational challenges. The progress of human endeavor, alike in the cognitive and practical domains as in that of artifice, represents an ever greater involvement with complexity.
