clipped from: cscs.umich.edu   

The notion is that "complex systems" (sometimes just "complex adaptive systems," both Names Which Must Be Destroyed) tend, in some ill-defined sense, to be poised on the border between order (no change or periodic change) and chaos (aperiodic change), because this is somehow the most flexible and evolvable position; that things "evolve to evolve" to the edge of chaos. --- The notion is that things at the edge-of-chaos are somehow optimized for adaptation and information-processing, and so natural selection would favor things near there, if indeed there isn't some inherent drive towards this edge. (One runs across both versions.)

I think the evolutionary argument, as usually stated, rests of a big mistake about what nervous systems, immune systems, genetic regulatory nets, etc., evolve to do
E. coli doesn't care about information flow in its regulatory network; it wants to be able to eat lactose when nothing else is around.
is the edge of chaos really that special?