Of Ants and Men: The Unexpected Side Effects of Complexity in Society

About the author

David Green is Professor of Information Technology at Monash University. He is internationally well-known for his research on complexity, especially the fundamental role played by networks. In the course of thirty-five years of research he has investigated the problems posed by complexity in fields as diverse as forest ecology, proteins and social networks. An early pioneer of the World Wide Web as a distributed information resource, he also contributed to national and international efforts to create comprehensive information resources about the world's biodiversity and environments. His other recent books include Complexity in Landscape Ecology and Dual Phase Evolution.

Competitive literature

Understanding social complexity is a huge challenge. The past decade has seen a host of books that begin to tackle the problem, each tackling some aspect of the problem. Examples include: The Tipping Point (Gladwell); Black Swans (Talleb); The Singularity Is Near (Kurzweil); The Wisdom of Crowds (Surowiecki); A Short History of Progress (Wright); Faster (Gleick) and Critical Mass (Ball). Each of these books deals with slices of the problem. Of Ants and Men shows how all of these issues fits into the emerging bigger picture of social complexity.