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Complex situations are commonly generated in biology by dependent actions occurring only after (or contingent upon) a previous occurrence that "set-up" or made its occurrence possible.
The stringing together through time, of sets of these series of occurrences (including molecular scale events), can result in much complexity. This can result in problems of classification and determining causes.
Examples:
The wild and crazy biological complexity of different forms we can currently observe are generated through both its long term evolutionary history (that has generated the complexity of different species we see today), as well as through a series of shorter term events that shape the individual forms of each organism (during its developmental (or medical) history).
This makes biology (and other similar sciences) different from much of physics, where situations being addressed are usually framed in "simpler" situations.
However, it seems to me that similar contingencies underlie the complexity of geology (what is the history of those sedimentary rocks, for example) and perhaps cosmology. There are probably examples in other sciences I am not thinking of.
Questions:
The stringing together through time, of sets of these series of occurrences (including molecular scale events), can result in much complexity. This can result in problems of classification and determining causes.
Examples:
The wild and crazy biological complexity of different forms we can currently observe are generated through both its long term evolutionary history (that has generated the complexity of different species we see today), as well as through a series of shorter term events that shape the individual forms of each organism (during its developmental (or medical) history).
This makes biology (and other similar sciences) different from much of physics, where situations being addressed are usually framed in "simpler" situations.
However, it seems to me that similar contingencies underlie the complexity of geology (what is the history of those sedimentary rocks, for example) and perhaps cosmology. There are probably examples in other sciences I am not thinking of.
Questions:
- Is history the best common term for all this?
- What terms from computer science (contingent, dependent?) are used for similar situations? Perhaps CS has some well developed way of addressing these situations that I am not aware of.
- Is there some branch of physics that deals with this general kind of chained (through time) phenomena?