Hey City Zen!

While grading papers a student asked me what were the top 10 papers in complex systems (since cybernetics) that most influenced me. I don't really have a top 10 list of papers (except for Weaver and Simon, perhaps). But I do have a top list of theories and ideas that I am always revisiting with different writings, and which constantly define and re-define my thinking (more or less in order of importance):

• Darwin's Natural Selection 
• Von Neumann/Turing's description/construction (or genotype/phenotype) distinction
• Pattee's semiotic closure 
• Clark and Chalmer's extended mind hypothesis 
• General Systems (including Network Science)
• Conrad's ideas on evolvability, high-dimensional bypass, and tradeoff principle 
• Interplay between self-organization, selection, and stigmergy (as motivated by many people like Kauffman, Holland, Grasse, Reynolds, Crutchfield, Mitchell, etc.) 
• Information Theory and Generalized Information Theory
• Vertebrate Immunity (as studied by Segel, Cohen, Coutinho, Forrest, Carneiro, etc.) 
• Enactivism: Autopoiesis (Varela and Maturana), Conversation Theory (Pask), and Embodied Cognition (Beer, Thelen and Smith)