As someone who has been a member of the Business Network
of the Santa Fe Institute, has worked with the people there -
including putting on two international conferences, and who finds
working with the ideas of complex adaptive systems a powerful
approach, I fully endorse John Warfield's comments.
I, for one, do not claim the order of "supersumption" that he
presents for complexity and chaos nor for genetic algorithms and
complex adaptive systems.
The power that I've gained from using these concepts is to consider
them to be linguistic tools for handling those phenomena which are
too complex to be otherwise handled - or at least to be more
pragmatically handled in certain circumstances - by the thinking and
thinking system that humans so far have developed.
-- Michael McMaster Michael@kbddean.demon.co.uk