When we're dealing with different interacting levels of a system, seemingly minor details can rise to the top and become important to the system as a whole. We need "Field biologists" to catalog and study detarticails and portions of our complex systems, including their failures and bugs. This kind of biological thinking not only leads to new insights, but might also be the primary way forward in a world of increasingly interconnected and incomprehensible technologies.
During the last three decades, a new conception of life has emerged at the forefront of science. It is a unified view that integrates life's biological, cognitive, social and ecological dimensions. At the very core of this new understanding of life we find a profound change of metaphors: from seeing the world as a machine to understanding it as a network.
This new science of life is now being developed by outstanding researchers and their teams around the world. I have integrated their concepts and ideas into a single coherent framework - a unique synthesis, which I will teach for the first time in this online course.