Of Ants and Men

About the authorDavid 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 literatureUnderstanding 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.

• From Bad to Worse.- Of Ants and Men.- A Tangled Web.- The Eye of the Beholder.- The Animal Within.- More things in heaven and earth.- The Sting in the Tail.- Divide and Rule.- One thing leads to another.- The Snowball Effect.- A Deadly Cascade.- Collateral damage.- The Straw that Broke the Camel's Back.- The Herd Instinct.- The Subatomic Family.- The Global Village.- The Root of All Evil.- Fouling the Nest.- Shaping the Future.