Cheaper than printing it out: buy the paperback book.

Ahmadjian, Vernon. Symbiosis: An Introduction to Biological Associations. Hanover, 1986.

A comprehensive text on symbiosis which is clear and crammed with insights.

Alberch, Pere. "Orderly Monsters: Evidence for internal constraint in development and evolution." In The construction of organisms: Opportunity and constraint in the evolution of organic form., Thomas, R. D. K. and W. E. Reif, eds.

One of the most amazing papers I have ever read. Explains why monstrosities in living creatures are so similar and "orderly" given all possibilities.

Aldersy-Williams, Hugh. "A solid future for smart fluids." New Scientist, 17 March 1990.

Fluids and gel that change their state when signaled. Engineers can use this response to make them "smart."

Allen, Thomas B. War Games: The Secret World of the Creators, Players, and Policy Makers Rehearsing World War III Today. McGraw-Hill, 1981.

Fascinating history and insider's view of the large-scale simulations which the U.S. military agencies run to decipher the life-and-death complexity of war.

Allen, T. F. H., and Thomas B. Starr. Hierarchy: Perspectives for Ecological Complexity. University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Very ambitious book, but a bit soft in its arguments and clarity. The main point: patterns in ecological systems can only be perceived if viewed or measured at the appropriate scale.

Allen, John. Biosphere 2: The Human Experience. Penguin, 1991.

Coffee table book on the making of Biosphere 2 by its original visionary. Good history on how the idea arose and was tried out. It covers the experiment until shortly before it "closed."

Allman, William F. Apprentices of Wonder: Inside the Neural Network Revolution. Bantam Books, 1989.

Neural networks are the paramount example of connectionism and bottom-up control. A light journalistic treatment of the major players in the field; a good intro.

Amato, Ivan. "Capturing Chemical Evolution in a Jar." Science, 255; 14 February 1992.

Self-replicating RNA which can generate mutant forms.

Amato, Ivan. "Animating the Material World." Science, 255; 17 January 1992.

Brief report on various experiments to put smartness into inanimate materials.

Anderson, Philip W., Kenneth J. Arrow, and David Pines. The Economy as an Evolving Complex System. Addison-Wesley, 1988.

A landmark series of papers in the esoteric realm of physics, math, computer science, and economics. Does a great job in reinventing how we think of the economy. The central shift is away from classical equilibrium. For lay readers the summary is in English and newsworthy.

Aspray, William and Arthur Burks, eds. Papers of John von Neumann on Computers and Computer Theory. MIT Press, 1967.

If you are math-challenged (as I am), you need only read the fine introduction and summary by Burks.

Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books, 1984.

Lucid account of how Prisoner's Dilemma and other open-ended games can illuminate political and social thought.

Badler, Norman I., Brian A. Barsky, and David Zeltzer, eds. Making Them Move: Mechanics, Control, and Animation of Articulated Figures. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1991.

To best exploit the technical details outlined in this book, you'll need the accompanying video of experimental figures trying to move. Some move quite well.

Bajema, Carl Jay, ed. Artificial Selection and the Development of Evolutionary Theory. Hutchinson Ross Publishing, 1982.

A banquet of benchmark papers on what artificial selection (breeding) has to say about natural selection. What is most noticeable is how paltry the feast is.

Basalla, George. The Evolution of Technology. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Makes the case (with fascinating examples) that all innovation is incremental and not abrupt. Emphasizes the importance of novelty in technological change.

Bass, Thomas A. The Eudaemonic Pie. Houghton Mifflin, 1985.

The bizarre true story of how a California hippie commune of physicists and computer nerds beat Las Vegas using chaos theory. Addresses the problem of time-series predictions. An overlooked great read.

------. "Road to Ruin." Discover, May 1992.

Story about Joel Cohen's expansion of the Braess paradox--that adding more roads to a network may slow it down.

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Ballentine, 1972.

A great book about the parallels between evolution and the mind. Of particular interest is the chapter on "The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution."

------. Mind and Nature. Dutton, 1979.

Bateson stresses and stretches the similarities between mind and evolution in nature.

Bateson, Mary Catherine. Our Own Metaphor. Smithsonian, 1972.

Mary Catherine Bateson's personal account of an informal conference on evolution, progress, and learning in human adaptation organized by her father, Gregory Bateson. The meeting was held to deal with the role of conscious purpose in such complex systems. Every conference should have such a document.

------. With a Daughter's Eye. William Morrow, 1984.

A memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson that is more than a memoir. Written by daughter Mary Catherine, who is an intellectual of equal caliber to her parents, this is a book of cybernetic family stories.

Bateson, Gregory and Mary Catherine Bateson. Angels Fear: Toward an Epistemology of the Sacred. Macmillian, 1987.

Interwoven between the final writings of Gregory Bateson--completed posthumously by his daughter Mary Catherine--are dialogues between father and daughter that convey Gregory's deep ideas of sacrament, communication, intelligence, and being.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Semiotext(e), Inc., 1983.

Short, very French, very dense, very poetic, very impenetrable, and somewhat useful in that he attempts to wring some meaning out of simulations.

Beaudry, Amber A., and Gerald F. Joyce. "Directed Evolution of an RNA Enzyme." Science, 257; 31 July 1992.

Elegant experimental results of directed breeding of RNA molecules.

Bedau, Mark A. "Measurement of Evolutionary Activity, Teleology, and Life." In Artificial Life II, Langton, Christopher G., ed. Addison-Wesley, 1990.

A most intriguing attempt to quantify direction in evolutionary activity.

------. "Naturalism and Teleology." In Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal, Wagner, Steven and Richard Warner, eds. University of Notre Dame Press, 1993.

Can natural systems have purpose? Yes.

Bedau, Mark A., Alan Bahm, and Martin Zwick. "The Evolution of Diversity." 1992.

Offers a metric for measuring diversity in an evolutionary system.

Bell, Gordon. "Ultracomputers: A Teraflop Before Its Time." Science, 256; 3 April 1992.

A bet whether parallel computers will beat serial computers in the race for power.

Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Henry Holt, 1911.

A classic of philosophy about the idea that evolution proceeds by some vital force.

Berry, F. Clifton. "Re-creating History: The Battle of 73 Easting." National Defense, November 1991.

Blow-by-blow account of the pivotal Gulf War battle that has been recreated as a Pentagon simulation.

Bertalanffy, Ludwig von. General System Theory. George Braziller, 1968. For many years this was the cybernetic bible.

It's still one of the few books on whole systems or "systems in general." But it seems to me to be vague even in the places I agree with. And Bertalanffy's signature idea--equifinality--I think is wrong, or at least incomplete.

Biosphere 2 Scientific Advisory Committee. "Report to the Chairman, Space Biosphere Ventures." Space Biosphere Ventures, 1992,

Evaluates the validity and quality of Biosphere 2's first nine months from a scientific viewpoint.

Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991.

A marvelous, overlooked little treasure that outlines the semiotic meaning of hypertext. The book is accompanied by an expanded version in hypertext for the Macintosh. I consider it a seminal work in "network culture."

Bonner, John Tyler. The Evolution of Complexity, by Means of Natural Selection. Princeton University Press, 1988.

A pretty good argument that evolution evolves toward complexity.

Botkin, Daniel B. Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century. Oxford University Press, 1990.

Essays in natural history by an ecologist who has a fresh view of nature as a disequilibrial system.

Bourbon, W. Thomas, and Williams T. Powers. "Purposive Behavior: A tutorial with data." Unpublished, 1988.

An intriguing claim that much behavior is not "caused" but emanates from emergent internal purposes. Illustrated with a simple experiment.

Bowler, Peter J. The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900. The John Hopkins University Press, 1983.

This history serves as an excellent primer on alternative scientific theories to strict neodarwinism.

------. The Invention of Progress. Basil Blackwell, 1989.

A fascinating scholarly examination of how during the Victorian era evolutionary theory initially created a notion of progress, a legacy only now eroding.

Braitenberg, Valentino. Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. The MIT Press, 1984.

Shows how very simple circuits can produce the appearance of complicated behaviors and movement. The experiments were eventually implemented in tiny model cars.

Brand, Stewart. II Cybernetic Frontiers. Random House, 1974.

A curious, small book that is pleasantly two-faced. One-half is the first published report on computer hackers playing computer games, and the other is Gregory Bateson talking about evolution and cybernetics.

------. The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT. Viking, 1987.

Although about media future, there are enough gems of insight about the future of interconnectivity to keep this rich book ahead of the curve.

Bratley, Paul, Bennet L. Fox, and Linus E. Schrage. A Guide to Simulation. Springer-Verlag, 1987.

The best overview of the role and dynamics of simulations in theory and practice.

Briggs, John. Turbulent Mirror. Harper & Row, 1989.

Goes from the theory of chaos to the "science of wholeness." Pretty good introduction to the strange behavior of complex systems, with many wonderful pictures and diagrams. Emphasizes the turbulent chaotic side, rather than the self-organizing side of wholeness.

Brooks, Daniel, and R. E. O. Wiley. Evolution as Entropy. The University of Chicago Press, 1986.

An important book although I have read only a little of it. I wish I had a more technical and mathematical background to plunge deeper into it and to appreciate its attempt to be a "unified theory of biology."

Brooks, Rodney A. "Elephants Don't Play Chess." Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 6; 1990.

Instead elephants wander around doing things in the real world. This paper summarizes Brooks's lab's attempts (about eight robots so far) to make intelligence situated in the real physical environment.

------. "Intelligence without representation." Artificial Intelligence, 47; 1991.

Treats the evolutionary aspects of bottom-up control in robots.

------. "New Approaches to Robotics." Science, 253; 1991.

Summary of Brooks's subsumption architecture for robots.

Brooks, Rodney A., and Anita Flynn. "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System." Journal of The British Interplanetary Society, 42; 1989.

About "invading a planet with millions of tiny robots." This is the source of my book title.

Brooks, Rodney A., Pattie Maes, Maja J. Mataric, and Grinell More. "Lunar Base Construction Robots." IROS, IEEE International Workshop on Intelligence Robots & Systems, 1990.

Proposal for a swarm of minibulldozers, saturated with "collective intelligence."

Bruckman, Amy. "Identity Workshop: Emergent Social and Psychological Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Reality." Unpublished, 1992.

Excellent study of the new sociology of teenage obsessives building and playing online MUDs.

Buss, Leo W. The Evolution of Individuality. Princeton University Press, 1987.

Difficult book to grasp. The introductory and summary chapters are clear and fascinating, and probably important in understanding hierarchical evolution. Buss is onto something vital: that the individual is not the only unit of selection in evolution.

Butler, Samuel. "Darwin Among the Machines." In Canterbury Settlement. AMS Press, 1923.

An essay written in 1863, by the author of "Erewhon," suggesting the biological nature of machines.

------. Evolution, Old and New. AMS Press, 1968.

An early (1879), but still persuasive, philosophical rant against Darwinism penned by an early supporter of Darwin who renegaded into a fierce anti-Darwinian stance.

Cairns-Smith, A.G. Seven Clues to the Origin of Life. Cambridge University Press, 1985.

The freshest book to date on the puzzle of the origin of life. Written as a scientific detective story. Digests in lay terms his more technical treatment in Genetic Takeover.

Card, Orson Scott. Ender's Game. Tom Doherty Associates, 1985.

A science fiction novel about kids trained to fight real wars while playing simulated war games.

Casdagli, Martin. "Nonlinear Forecasting, Chaos and Statistics." In Nonlinear Modeling and Forecasting, Casdagli, M., and S. Eubank, eds. Addison-Wesley, 1992.

Some heavy-duty algorithms for extracting order from irregularity.

Cellier, Francois E. Progress in Modelling and Simulation. Academic Press, 1982.

Deals with the practical problems of computers modeling ill-defined systems.

Chapuis, Alfred. Automata: A Historical and Technological Study. B. T. Batsford, 1958.

Amazing details of amazing clockwork automatons in history, both European and Asian. Can be thought of as a catalog of early attempts at artificial life.

Chaum, David. "Security Without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete." Communications of the ACM, 28, 10; October 1985.

Highly detailed explanation of how an ID-less electronic money system works. Very readable and visionary. A revised version is even clearer. Worth seeking out.

Cherfas, Jeremy. "The ocean in a box." New Scientist, 3 March 1988.

Journalistic report on Walter Adey's synthetic coral reefs.

Cipra, Barry. "In Math, Less Is More--Up to a Point." Science, 250; 23 November 1990.

Report on Hwang and Du's proof of shortening a network by adding more nodes.

Clearwater, Scott H., Bernardo A. Huberman, and Tad Hogg. "Cooperative Solution of Constraint Satisfaction Problems." Science, 254; 22 November 1991.

Pioneer work on cooperative problem solving. Tells how managing "hints" for a swarm of cooperating agents trying to solve a problem is vital to the agents' success.

Cohen, Frederick B. A Short Course on Computer Viruses. ASP Press, 1990.

The scoop from the guy who coined the term "computer virus."

Cole, H. S. D., et al. Models of Doom. Universe Books, 1973.

A critique of the model/book "Limits to Growth" done by an interdisciplinry team at Sussex University in England.

Colinvaux, Paul. Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare. Princeton University Press, 1978.

Pure pleasure. Wonderful prose in a short book on the intricacies and complexities of ecological relationships. Based on the author's own naturalist experiences. Seeks to extract ecological principles. Best book I know of about the cybernetic connectiveness of ecological systems.

Conrad, Michael, and H. H. Pattee. "Evolution Experiments with an Artificial Ecosystem." Journal of Theoretical Biology, 28; 1970.

One of the earliest experiments in modeling coevolutionary behavior on a computer.

Conrad, Michael. Adaptability: The Significance of Variability from Molecule to Ecosystem. Plenum Press, 1983.

A good try at describing adaptation in broad terms across many systems.

------. "The brain-machine disanalogy." Biosystems, 22; 1989.

Argues that no machine using present day organization or materials could pass the Turing Test. In other words, human-type intelligence will only come with human-type brains.

------. "Physics and Biology: Towards a Unified Model." Applied Mathematics and Computation, 32; 1989.

I verge on understanding this short paper; I think there's a good idea here.

Cook, Theodore Andre. The Curves of Life. Dover, 1914.

The self-organizing power of living spirals, in pictures.

Crutchfield, James P. "Semantics and Thermodynamics." In Nonlinear Modeling and Forecasting, Casdagli, M., and S. Eubank, eds. Addison-Wesley, 1992.

Further work on an automatic method for extracting a mathematical model from a set of data over time.

Culotta, Elizabeth. "Forecasting the Global AIDS Epidemic." Science, 253; 23 August 1991.

Various studies take the same problem, same data, and get wildly different models. Good example of the problems inherent in simulations.

------. "Forcing the Evolution of an RNA Enzyme in the Test Tube." Science, 257; 31 July 1992.

Nice summary of Gerald Joyce's work.

Dadant & Sons, eds. The Hive and the Honey Bee. Dadant & Sons, 1946.

Bees are probably the most studied of insects. This fat book offers practical management tips for the distributed organism of bees and their hives.

Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. Collier Books, 1872.

The fountainhead of all books on evolution. Darwinism reigns in large part because this book is so full of details, supporting evidence, and persuasive arguments, all so well written, that other theories pale in comparison.

Davies, Paul. "A new science of complexity." New Scientist, 26 November 1988.

Nicely written overview article of the new perspective of complexity.

------. The Mind of God. Simon & Schuster, 1992.

I have not yet been able to say exactly why I think this book is so apt to my subject of complexity and evolution. It's about current understandings of the underlying laws of the physical universe, but Davies presents these laws in the space of all possible laws, or all possible universes, and talks about why these laws were chosen or evolved or happened. Thus one gets into the mind of God, or god. It's full of fresh perspectives and near-heretical thoughts.

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, 1976.

A wholly original idea (that genes replicate for their own reasons) and brilliant exposition. Dawkins also introduces his equally original secondary idea of memes (ideas that replicate for their own reasons).

------. The Blind Watchmaker. W.W. Norton, 1987.

Perhaps the most neodarwinian of all books. Dawkins presents the case for a "universe without design" based entirely on natural selection. And he writes so well and clearly that his forceful ideas are hard to argue with. At the very least, this book is probably the best general introduction to orthodox evolutionary theory anywhere. Full of clever examples.

------. "The Evolution of Evolvability." In Artificial Life, Langton, Christopher G., ed. Addison-Wesley, 1988.

A brilliant sketch of a stunningly new idea: that evolvability can evolve.

Dempster, William F. "Biosphere II: Technical Overview of a Manned Closed Ecological System." Society of Automotive Engineers, 1989, SAE Technical Paper Series #891599.

Prelaunch technical details about the engineering achievements of Bio2.

Denton, Michael. Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Burnett Books, 1985.

This is the best scientific critique of Darwinian evolution available. Denton does not seem to have a hidden agenda, which is refreshing in these kinds of books.

Depew, David J., and Bruce H. Weber, eds. Evolution at a Crossroads. The MIT Press, 1985.

A collection of scientific papers that explore fairly radical approaches to the steep conceptual problems in evolution theory.

De Robertis, Eddy M. et al. "Homeobox Genes and the Vertebrate Body Plan." Scientific American, July 1990.

Readable article on importance of ancient homeobox regulatory genes.

Dixon, Dougal. After Man: A Zoology of the Future. St. Martin's Press, 1981.

The only book I know that extrapolates evolution into the future without being capricious or superficial, that is, with some measure of scope and consistency. Although not meant to be scientific, this gorgeously illustrated book is an inspiration.

Dobzhansky, Theodosius. Mankind Evolving. Yale University Press, 1962.

A rather old-fashioned book in tone, geneticist Dobzhansky calmly plunges into the controversial waters of race, intelligence, personality, and evolution.

Drake, James A. "Community-assembly Mechanics and the Structure of an Experimental Species Ensemble." The American Naturalist, 137; January 1991.

Elegant experiments showing how the order and timing of introducing species influences the final mix of an ecological community.

Drexler, K. Eric. "Hypertext Publishing and the Evolution of Knowledge." Social Intelligence, 1; 2, 1991.

A thorough and enthusiastic sketch of a distributed public hypertext system and its advantages in spurring scientific knowledge

Dupre, John, ed. The Latest on the Best: Essays on Evolution and Optimality. The MIT Press, 1987.

By and large these essays make a convincing case that biological systems do not optimize to the best, because the question "best for what?" can't be answered.

Dykhuizen, Daniel E. "Experimental Evolution: Replicating History." Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 7; August 1992.

Review and comments on laboratory studies of observed evolution within microbial populations.

Dyson, Freeman. From Eros to Gaia. HarperCollins, 1990.

Contains great chapter on "Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere and the Biosphere."

------. Origins of Life. Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Refreshingly lucid and orthogonal view of the origin of life problem by a noted physicist. In terms of brilliance has much in common with Schrodinger's "What is Life?"

------. Infinite in All Directions. Harper & Row, 1988.

An original thinker writes very lyrically on whatever interests him, which is usually what almost no one else is thinking about. Dyson can take an ordinary subject and find incredibly fresh insights in it. In this volume he considers how the universe will end.

Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

The key essay in this compendium should be required reading for all Americans graduating from high school. It's about the real, the fake, and the hyperreal.

Eigen, Manfred, and Peter Schuster. The Hypercycle: A Principle of Natural Self-Organization. Springer-Verlag, 1979.

A powerful abstraction of cycles within cycles producing self-made stable cycles, or hypercycles.

Eldredge, Niles. Unfinished Synthesis: Biological Hierarchies and Modern Evolutionary Thought. Oxford University Press, 1985.

Eldredge, who coauthored punctuated equilibrium theory, here pushes evolutionary theory further in a pioneering work on hierarchies of evolutionary change. By all accounts understanding hierarchical change is the next frontier in the science of complexity.

------. Macroevolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches, and Adaptive Peaks. McGraw-Hill, 1989.

A technical treatise for professionals on how emergent levels of evolution impact adaptation at the species level.

Endler, John A. Natural Selection in the Wild. Princeton University Press, 1986.

Endler rounds up all known studies of natural selection in nature and dissects them rigorously. In the process he arrives at refreshing insights of what natural selection is.

Flynn, Anita, Rodney A. Brooks, and Lee S. Tavrow. "Twilight Zones and Cornerstones: A gnat robot double feature." MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 1989, A.I. Memo 1126.

Blue-sky dreaming on why and how to build tiny gnat-sized robots--disposable, entirely self-contained autonomous critters that can do real work.

Foerster, Heinz von. "Circular Causality: Fragments." Intersystems Publications, ca. 1980.

A short chronology of the Macy Conference and the participants at each meeting, and an introduction to the seed idea of emergent "telos" or goal and purpose.

------. Observing Systems. Intersystems Publications, 1981.

An anthology of von Foerster's papers. These range from mathematical treatise to philosophical rants. All point to von Foerster's law that observers are part of the system.

Fogel, Lawrence J., Alvin J. Owens, and Michael J. Walsh. Artificial Evolution Through Simulated Evolution. Wiley & Sons, 1966.

Early connectionism that didn't produce much intelligence but did prove the worth of evolutionary programming. This is probably the first computational evolution.

Folsome, Clair E. "Closed Ecological Systems: Transplanting Earth's Biosphere to Space." AIAA, May 1987.

A rough sketch at what science needs to know to make a closed extraterrestrial living habitat.

Folsome, Clair E., and Joe A. Hanson. "The Emergence of Materially-closed-system Ecology." In Ecosystem Theory and Application, Polunin, Nicholas, ed. John Wiley & Sons, 1986.

A wonderful report on sealed jars of microbial life that keep going and going. The authors measure the energy flow and productivity of the closed system.

Forrest, Stephanie, ed. Emergent Computation. North-Holland, 1990.

How does collective and cooperative behavior step out of a mass of computing nodes? These proceedings from a conference on nonlinear systems round up current approaches from neural nets, cellular automata, and simulated annealing, among other computatioal techniques.

Frazzetta, T. H. Complex Adaptations in Evolving Populations. Sinauer Associates, 1975.

Realistically examines the riddle of how adaptation occurs with linked genes in real, fuzzy populations. Sort of an engineer's approach; pretty readable.

Frosch, Robert A., and Nicholas E. Gallopoulos. "Strategies for Manufacturing." Scientific American, September 1989.

A position paper that introduces closed loop manufacturing and the biological analog.

Gardner, M. R., and W. R. Ashby. "Connectance of Large Dynamic (Cybernetic) Systems: Critical Values for Stability." Nature, 228; 5273, 1970.

Often cited paper on ratio between connectivity and stability.

Gelernter, David. Mirror Worlds. Oxford University Press, 1991.

A magically elegant vision of mirroring real systems (such as a town or hospital) with parallel real-time virtual models as a means of overseeing, managing, and exploring them.

Gell-Mann, Murray. "Simplicity and Complexity in the Description of Nature." Engineering & Science, 3, Spring 1988.

A not-impressive start at unraveling the difference between simplicity and complexity. But it's something.

George, F. H. The Foundations of Cybernetics. Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1977.

A lukewarm (but French!) overview of cybernetics (pretty much outdated by now) with a couple of good generalizations.

Gilder, George. Microcosmos: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Simon and Schuster, 1989.

A generous and meaty book on how technology is retreating from the material realm and heading into the symbolic realm, and the economic consequences of that shift.

Gleick, James. Chaos. Viking Penguin, 1987.

This bestseller hardly needs an introduction. It's a model of science writing, both in form and content. Although a small industry of chaos books has followed its worldwide success, this one is still worth rereading as a delightful way to glimpse the implications of complex systems.

Goldberg, David E. Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning. Addison-Wesley, 1989.

Best technical overview of genetic algorithms.

Goldschmidt, Richard. The Material Basis of Evolution. Yale University Press, 1940.

To get to the juicy parts, you have to read a lot of old-fashioned 1940s genetics. Consider this the prime source of the hopeful monster theory.

Gould, Stephen Jay. Ever Since Darwin. W. W. Norton, 1977.

Gould's essays never fail to inform and change my mind. In this collection, I was particularly attentive to "The Misunderstood Irish Elk."

------. The Panda's Thumb. W. W. Norton, 1980.

Of all Gould's anthologies of essays from his column in Natural History, this one has the most about macroevolutionary dynamics and new evolutionary thinking.

------. Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes. W. W. Norton, 1983.

Lots of fascinating history about evolution theory in Gould's peerless style.

------. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. W. W. Norton, 1989.

A splendid masterwork. Rich, lucid, flawless, and iconoclastic. Gould's story of the painful reinterpretation of old shale fossils leading to an altered view of the history of life--that of decreasing diversity--is a mandatory read these days.

------. "Opus 200." Natural History, August 1991.

You'll find no better, more succinct explanation of how punctuated equilibrium works than this one from the horse's mouth. Not only the why but also a bit of history of what supporters call "punk eke" and detractors label "evolution by jerks."

Gould, Stephen Jay, and R.C. Lewontin. "The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme." Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B 205; 1979.

An oft-cited paper that argues against perceiving everything as the result of selective adaptation (the Panglossian paradigm). Gould makes a very readable case for a plurality of evolutionary dynamics.

Gould, Stephen Jay, and Elisabeth S. Vrba. "Exaptation--a missing term in the science of form." Paleobiology, 8; 1, 1982.

The term is for a feature devised as an adaptation for one reason which is then repurposed for another adaptive pressure. Using feathers devised for warmth in order to fly is the stock example.

Grasse, Pierre P. Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation. Academic Press, 1977.

Representative subchapters cover such juicy topics as "Limits to Adaptation," and "Forbidden Phenotypes," favorite postdarwinian challenges. Provocative book.

Hamilton, William D., Robert Axelrod, and Reiko Tanese. "Sexual reproduction as an adaptation to resist parasites (A Review)." Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA, 87; May 1990.

Not only is this a clever and convincing explanation of the origin of sex, but it is a marvelous demonstration of the power of computational biology.

Harasim, Linda M., ed. Global Networks. The MIT Press, 1993.

Twenty-one contributors speak on the effects seen so far of decentralized high-bandwidth communication at global scale; there is little hard data, mostly hints of opportunities and pitfalls.

Hayes-Roth, Frederick. "The machine as partner of the new professional." IEEE Spectrum, 1984.

Source of cute employment letter for humans.

Heeter, Carrie. "BattleTech Masters: Emergence of the First U.S. Virtual Reality SubCulture." Michigan State University, Computer Center, 1992.

Somewhere between a scholarly report and a marketing survey of the fanatical users of the first commercial networked virtual reality installation.

Heims, Steve J. The Cybernetics Group. The MIT Press, 1991.

An incredibly thorough history of the agenda and flavor of the Macy Conferences and vignettes of some of the illustrious participants.

Hillis, W. Daniel. The Connection Machine. The MIT Press, 1985.

The inventor's conceptual blueprint for the first commercial parallel processing computer and a few thoughts on what it might mean.

------. "Intelligence as an Emergent Behavior." In Artificial Intelligence, Graubard, Stephen, ed. The MIT Press, 1988.

In a special issue of Daedulus magazine which examined the state of artificial intelligence research in 1988, Hillis offers a connectionist view of possible AI, but one embedded in parallel and evolutionary processes. His are some of the most intelligent remarks I've heard on intelligence.

Hiltz, Starr Roxanne and Murray Turoff. The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer (Revised Edition). The MIT Press, 1993.

A visionary book when it was first published in 1978, it accurately forecasted many of the effects of intensely connected computer communications and distributed groups. It still has much to say about the coming network culture. A new section in the revised edition addresses the authors' current thoughts on superconnectivity.

Hinton, Geoffrey E., and Steven J. Nowlan. "How Learning Can Guide Evolution." Complex Systems, 1; 1987.

This very brief paper presents intriguing results of a type of Lamarckian evolution running on computers and some provocative speculations of other postdarwinian evolutions.

Ho, Mae-Wan, and Peter T. Saunders. Beyond Neo-Darwinism. Academic Press, 1984.

Not too many non-Darwinian books are published within science itself. This one comes from real biologists getting results that are suggestive, or merely permit a hint, of non-Darwinian evolution. This is good science at work.

Hofstadter, Douglas. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Basic Books, 1979.

Identical in all respects to the strangely loopy Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, Copper, Silver, Gold: an Indestructible Metallic Alloy by Egbert B. Gebstadter, now out of print.

Holldobler, Bert, and Edward O. Wilson. The Ants. Harvard University Press, 1990.

Deep, deep, rich, rich. All that is known about ants to date (including some expanded and revised sections from Wilson's earlier "Insect Societies"). A book to own and get lost in. Deserves the Pulitzer Prize it won.

Huberman, B. A. The Ecology of Computation. Elsevier Science Publishers, 1988.

A most interesting collection of pioneering papers on using economic and ecological dynamics within computation to manage complex computational tasks.

Johnson, Phillip E. Darwin on Trial. Regnery Gateway, 1991.

Johnson is a lawyer who treats Neo-Darwinism as a defendant on trial, and subjects its evidence to the strict rules of court. He concludes that it is an unproven hypothesis that does not at this point seem to fit the evidence at hand. For the uninitiated layperson, a good first read on anti-Darwinism, but it follows lawyerly logic rather than science logic.

Kanerva, Pentti. Sparse Distributed Memory. MIT Press, 1988.

A dry, but daring monograph on a new architecture for computer memory, one that relies on weak associative connections. Wonderful forward by Douglas Hofstadter, who explains the novel design's significance.

Kauffman, Stuart A. "Antichaos and Adaptation." Scientific American, August 1991.

A very accessible summation of Kauffman's important major ideas, with nary an equation in it. Read this one first.

------. "The Sciences of Complexity and `Origins of Order'." Santa Fe Institute, 1991, technical report 91-04-021.

A personal and almost poetic short history of Kauffman's own idea of self-
organizing order.

------. The Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution. Oxford University Press, 1993.

A sprawling, deep, massive magnum opus of a book, as dense as a dictionary. Kauffman tries to tell you everything he knows, and he's bright, so hang in there. It's about the yin and yang of natural selection and self-organization. A seminal work, not to be missed.

Kauppi, Pekka E., Karl Mielikainen, and Kullervo Kuusela. "Biomass and Carbon Budget of European Forests, 1971 to 1990." Science, 256; 3 April 1992.

Shows a biomass increase in Gaia which may be due to atmospheric carbon dioxide increase.

Kay, Alan C. "Computers, Networks and Education." Scientific American, September 1991.

An notable vision of how peer-to-peer networks might change education.

Kleiner, Art. "The Programmable World." Popular Science, May 1992.

About a chip that could be the basis for smart houses and distributed cooperative computing in the fabricated environment.

Kochen, Manfred. The Small World. Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1989.

Small world as in "there must be only 200 people in the whole world because I keep running into the same ones." If you go deeper into this incredibly rich volume of studies on social networks, you'll find it contains some of the coolest data for network culture seen yet. Here are real numbers on how many friends-of-a-friend connect us all.

Koestler, Arthur. Janus: A Summing Up. Random House, 1978.

No critic of Darwin in modern times has been as literate or influential as the brilliant Koestler. He spends the latter third of this book summing up his objections to Darwinism, and offering some suggestions for alternatives. His agile thinking on the subject loosened up my mind.

Korner, Christian, and John A. Arnone. "Responses to Elevated Carbon Dioxide in Artificial Tropical Ecosystems." Science, 257; 18 September 1992.

Where the CO2 goes in closed greenhouses.

Koza, John. Genetic Programming: On the Programming of Computers by Means of Natural Selection. The MIT Press, 1992.

More than anyone else, Koza has tried to evolve software in systematic ways. This humongous tome is the record of his experimental details and results.

Langreth, Robert. "Engineering Dogma Gives Way to Chaos." Science, 252; 10 May 1991.

How engineers can outsmart chaotic vibration and injury with antichaos.

Langton, Christopher G., ed. Artificial Life. Addison-Wesley, 1987.

The mother of all artificial life studies. This is the proceedings of the first a-life workshop. The breadth of the articles is amazing.

Langton, Christopher, et al, eds. Artificial Life II. Addison-Wesley, 1992.

True news here. The most recent results of simulations of artificial evolution and protolife in computers. Original, deeply significant, and very accessible papers. Probably the most important book in this bibliography.

Lapo, Andrey. Traces of Bygone Biospheres. Synergetic Press, 1987.

Very Russian reclassification of life types on Earth by a sort of grand biomystic combining Chardin's "noosphere" with Lovelock's "Gaia," and Vernadsky's geochemcial vitalism. Hard to read but intriguing.

Laszlo, Ervin. Evolution, the Grand Synthesis. Shambhala, 1987.

New-agey speculations of the role of evolutionary change in the universe. I guess I found the freewheeling style and long view refreshing although I can't say I learned anything in particular from it.

Latil, Pierre de. Thinking by Machine: A Study of Cybernetics. Houghton Mifflin, 1956.

A real find. This French author had the most insightful and news-filled takes on feedback cybernetics I found anywhere. All the more amazing for having been written in 1956. I owe much to him.

Layzer, David. Cosmogenesis: The Growth of Order in the Universe. Oxford University Press, 1990.

Seems a bit flaky to me, but he did have an unusual idea or two that I couldn't dismiss. He came up with "reproductive instability" as a driving force in evolution.

Lenat, Douglas B. "The Heuristics of Nature: The Plausible Mutation of DNA." Stanford Heuristic Programming Project, 1980, technical report HPP-80-27.

The most heretical, yet plausible, alternative theory to Darwinian evolution I am aware of is compactly presented in this technical report from the Stanford Computer Science Department.

Leopold, Aldo. Aldo Leopold's Wilderness: Selected early writings by the author of A Sand County Almanac. Stackpole Books, 1990.

Among many other things, this volume airs Leopold's early thoughts about the role of fire in natural systems.

Levy, Steven. Artificial Life. Pantheon, 1992.

An extremely enjoyable narrative of the making of the artificial life movement and a memorable overview of its central ideas and characters.

Lewin, Roger. Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos. Macmillian Publishing, 1992.

Annotated interviews with some of the central characters currently involved in making complexity itself a science. Not as deep or satisfying as Waldrop's book about the same subject, or Levy's on artificial life; this one gives a quick but superficial overview, and has a more biological, rather than mathematical, slant. Best part is the treatment of the problem of direction or trends in evolution.

Lightman, Alan, and Owen Gingerich. "When Do Anomalies Begin?" Science, 255; 7 February 1991.

Provocative thesis on the mechanism of progress within science.

Lima-de-Faria, A. Evolution without Selection: Form and Function by Autoevolution. Elsevier, 1988.

A difficult book. He seems to arrive at the same place as Kauffman but by intuitive and poetic means, rather than mathematics and science.

Lipset, David. Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist. Prentice-Hall, 1980.

Bateson was interested in all things mysteriously complex. This biography of him and his interests illuminates the range of complexities that might be understood by looking at language, learning, the unconscious, and evolution.

Lloyd, Seth. "The Calculus of Intricacy." The Sciences, October 1990.

The best general introduction to defining complexity I have seen, and gracefully written to boot.

Lovece, Joseph A. "Commercial Applications of Unmanned Air Vehicles." Mobile Robots and Unmanned Vehicles, 1, August-July 1990.

Comprehensive roundup of current work-in-progress in commercial autonomous robots.

Lovelock, James. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth. W. W. Norton, 1988.

Lovelock rounds out his Gaia hypothesis into a theory here, and offers his best arguments and observations in support of it. He also speaks of how Gaia might have evolved.

Lovtrup, Soren. Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth. Croom Helm, 1987.

This is detailed blow-by-blow history of the ideas and personalities of anti-Darwinism. It's chock-full of delicious excerpts and quotes from past critics up until the present. It goes deep into the doubts of other experts about Darwinism.