Complexity vs. Linked

As I’m reading Complexity by Mitchell Waldrop, I’m getting the feeling that the ideas presented in Albert-László Barabási’s Linked aren’t that new. See for example this quote from Complexity:

Three years earlier, in 1949, [Donald O.] Hebb [of McGill University in Montreal] had published his answer [to the question of how the brain refines and adapts its behaviour through experience] in a book entitled The Organization of Behavior. His fundamental idea was to assume that the brain is constantly making subtle changes in the “synapses,” [...]. [He] argued that these synaptic changes were in fact the basis of all learning and memory. A sensory impulse coming on from the eyes, for example, would leave its trace on the neural network by strengthening all the synapses that lay along its path. ... a result, said Hebb, a network that started out at random would rapidly organize itself. Experience would accumulate through a kind of positive feedback: the strong, frequently used synapses would grow stronger, while the weak, seldom-used synapses would athropy. The favored synapses would eventually become so strong that the memories would be locked in. These memories, in turn, would tend to be widely distributed over the brain, with each one corresponding to a complex pattern of synapses involving thousands or millions of neurons. (Hebb was one of the first to describe such distributed memories as “connectionist.”)

But there was more. In his lecture, [J. C. R.] Licklider [a psychologist from MIT] went on to explain Hebb’s second assumption: that the selective strengthening of the synapses would cause the brain to organize itself into “cell assemblies” – subsets of several thousand neurons in which circulating nerve impulses would reinforce themselves and continue to circulate. Hebb considered these cell assemblies to be the brain’s basic building blocks of information. Each one would correspond to a tone, a flash of light, or a fragment of an idea. And yet these assemblies would not be physically distinct. Indeed, they would overlap, with any given neuron belonging to several of them. And because of that, activating one assembly would inevitably lead to the activation of others, so that these fundamental building blocks would quickly organize themselves into larger concepts and more complex behaviors. The cell assemblies, in short, would be the fundamental quanta of thought.

Cell assemblies seem similar to hubs, and throughout the book, the concept of growing networks is indeed used in biology, neurology, and artificial intelligence. When you read Linked, you get the feeling that growing networks was something that nobody has thought of prior to the last decade. Also, it seems clear that links in these networks aren’t formed completely at random (in the above quote, for example).