In March 2013, Para Limes organized the conference A Crude look at the Whole. It turned out to be an extraordinary meeting, even more so eleven years later. During the conference the speakers, all giants on their own turf, captured the excitement about what the new field of complexity science could mean for understanding our world and molded it in approaches to extract meaning from these budding insights. Now, eleven years later, the (video's of the) talks create a thrill, that may be similar to what Newton felt when he realized that standing on the shoulders of giants allowed him to see what he saw.In this book we have tried to capture that whole, while at the same time keeping the individual parts in view. We have done so by transcribing and editing the individual presentations, adding a summary to all of them and indicating the relevance of each of the presentations to ongoing and further explorations.
