“Why do things ? engines, organizations, societies ? become more complex?” pondered Stanford’s economist W. Brian Stuart in an essay in the Scientific American.   In the first part of our lecture we will try to define the intriguing concept of complexity and one of its enigmatic aspects: emergence.  There is no doubt that the most fascinating example of complexity is life or any living system, for that matter.  This audience is privileged to be familiar with physical and chemical principles, which makes it a lot simpler to appreciate and comprehend the likely mechanism towards biological complexity.   Stuart Kauffman has proposed a plausible argument why life may emerge in a “broth” of diverse chemicals, only if this broth has a minimal complexity.

An impressive aspect of life is its great order.  We have selected native proteins out of the many examples of biological order because this Department has obtained some interesting results for protein folding.  In this context we will draw special attention to the so-called “thermodynamic hypothesis” of Nobel laureate [1973] Christian B. Anfinsen because, as we hope to show, thermodynamics plays a prominent role in the emergence of complex systems.  The ultimate driving force behind emerging complexity might well be of thermodynamic origin.  

Finally, we briefly mention recent activities in the field of statistical thermodynamics and molecular simulation as an introduction to the subject of the second speaker of this afternoon.