In this exhilarating account, biologist Jack Cohen and mathematician Ian Stewart begin by presenting the traditional scientific view of these questions, which explains intelligence and human culture in terms of evolution and biological development. These, in turn, are explained by the chemistry of DNA, which is itself a consequence of atomic structure, reducing the whole of nature to simple laws of physics.

In the second half Cohen and Stewart argue that something fundamental is missing in this traditional reductionist view of science and explore what they consider a far more important question, why simple structures exist at all. They re-examine the issues from this new viewpoint, focusing on the ability of complicated rules to generate simple behaviour. Provocative and controversial, their approach has groundbreaking implications for the way we understand evolution, the nature of nature, and the nature of science as a whole.