An account of how and why the Santa Fe Institute was formed is given by describing the people involved and the projects they were working on. Along the way, a wonderful description of the phrase "complex system" is derived.

I enjoyed this book becuase the personal accounts helped create a feeling of what it was like to be discovering a new way of thinking about our world's phenomena. Reading some of their thought processes was one of the best ways to learn what it means to think in a complex systems way.

If there lacks a correlation between intelligence and culture, how did the various world cultures come to have such disparate levels of technology? Jared Diamond formulates a reason for this disparity by looking at the Earth's geography and its early distribution of plants and animals.

I found this book so intriguing and enjoyable partly due to its historical details about early cultures, crops, and livestock, but mostly because Mr. Diamond answers a question about the development of human culture by talking about the external environment that has influenced it. In a world where cars and planes allow us to forego the geographical barriers of yesterday, it is striking to think that these same barriers may have been so importantly tied to who has and has not the planes and cars.