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Dumuzi and Inanna

( Size: 50cm x 63cm )

Dumuzi and Inanna

Leila Kubba Kawash 1999.

Complexity comment:

Love is universal, at all levels of the ecological chain mothers care for their young. Many other properties are specific, bones, legs, intelligence for example appear only in certain instances. This contrast between the universal and the specific distinguishes complexity thought from that of conventional disciplines. Normal academic fields are very specific, their findings are only applicable within that field and often only to very small areas of it. A divide and conquer approach is used to the world by science, along with the assumption that a finding in, say, astronomy will be of no earthly use in biology. All fields are thus assumed discrete.

Complexity theory takes the opposite approach. Here we regard systems as systems regardless of how they are constituted. If we know of a systemic property, then we will expect (in the absence of contradictory information) that all systems will share that property, whether built of silicon, protein, liquid or light. This new science can apply across all fields, covering systems in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and sociology and uses the same methodology and explanations for all of them. Surprisingly, we find, when we attempt this, that such generalisations are largely valid. Indeed, exactly the same concepts often already exist within the differing disciplines, just being obscured from view by the use of differing jargon (specialist terms). But by getting together specialists from various disciplines to work as part of one team, complexity thinking is establishing for the first time a general science of the universe, a step as far beyond what has gone before as the advances of Newton and Einstein were to the sciences of their day.

Page Version 1.1 March 2001
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