Social Complexity: Can It Be Analyzed and Modelled?

A s many biological and social systems consist of a large number of interacting constituents and show complex emergent and self-organized properties in structure, function, and response, one might ask whether their complexity is in the number of key elements. The answer is "No" since for example from biology we have learned that humans have 46 chromosomes, while the potato we eat has 48 and the cotton we wear has 52 or in other terms a roundworm (C. elegans) has nearly 20 000 and a mustard family plant (Arabidobsis) of about 27000 while humans have 23000 protein coding genes. On the other hand from sociology we have learned that the world with nearly seven billion inhabitants is a small world after all, since every one is separated on average by six steps from the others. So rather than having it in number it is the connectivities and their nature that matter and thus these systems could be viewed as some sort of communication systems with many non-identical elements linked with diverse interactions. Hence they could be envisaged as networks.