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While systems biology is an area of study dating back to Aristotle, it is also a revamped paradigm that treats organic systems as greater than the sum of their parts (e.g., challenging the view of the brain as a computer and the mind as the program running on it). After Konopka (BioLingua Research, Gaithersburg, Maryland) introduces its basics, international contributors to nine chapters discuss chaos and other metaphors used to describe complex processes, examples of systems thinking, and an engineering perspective on biological complexity that includes a critique of von Neumann's self-reproducing automaton. The glossary of terms is drawn from such diverse fields as general systems theory, computer science, and genetics. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
