In this volume, members of the French Academy from several disciplines - including fluid mechanics, economics, philosophy, theoretcial physics and biology - offer scientific and theoretical analyses of the concepts of order, chaos and determinism as they emerge in such complex and diverse systems as atmosphere, oceans, monetary economics and biological organisms. Using turbulence in fluid mechanics as the chief model, the authors describe and explain the behaviour of systems that tend toward a particular end-state, such as an attractor in dynamic systems. The result is an interdisciplinary study of complex behaviour and its philosophical consequences in fluid mechanics, meteorology, oceanography, physics, embryology, genetics and economics.