The biologist's progblem is the problem of complexity. According to the conventional wisdom, the way to study complex systems is by breaking them down into their parts. In Richard Dawkins's words, "the biologist tries to explain the workings, and coming into existence, of complex things in terms of simpler things. He can regard his task as done when he has arrived at entities so simple that the...

New institutionalism is an approach to the study of social events that is becoming increasingly popular. Different lines of new institutional research can be distinguished. In one line of research it is argued that the social sciences should transcend reductionist modes of explanation, in particular the methodological individualism exemplified by the theory of rational choice. In this view, red...

0 Introduction In deening concurrency one dichotomy that has arisen is between reductionism and primitivism. The reductionist viewpoint reduces concurrent behavior to nondeterministic sequential behavior by viewing it as interleaving. The primitive school treats concurrent behavior as a basic form of behavior in its own right, distinct from and indeed more general than sequential behavior. A ba...