The Diversity of a System is Another Kind of Disorder

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Diversity is an additional kind of disorder that can be crucial for system function
Simple complex system models have identical elements, whereas the immune system has different types of cells and workers
Diversity in complex systems such as the immune system refers to non-identical elements

In most of our episodes so far, we've taken a single concept and looked at it through the context of a single example. But in this episode and the next, we're going to pull back the camera to get a bird's-eye view of complexity science, by exploring the features common to all complex systems.

We're joined again by Karoline Wiesner, Professor of Complexity Science in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Potsdam in Germany. In this episode, Karoline is going to explain four conditions that we see in complexity science: numerosity, disorder and diversity, feedback, and non-equilibrium. At the end of the episode, she's going to bring them all together to explain a central concept of complex systems: emergence.

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