33 It is only via this growth pattern—of multiplying links, relations, and connections—that newly curious configurations can be conceived, new architectures erected, and new affinities sewn together. Curiosity is a rogue shuttling across networks, a randomized walk, a lunging across lattices that has the capacity to upend it all.

At its best, science roams all unknown waters, with ethics at its helm and sails spread with the processive value of coming to know rather than the possessive value of owning the known.

We take the time to wonder, “Do I dare?” And as we do, we find one simple answer: curiosity does dare. It dares “disturb the universe.”2

“Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow worker and accomplice.”

Traditionally, philosophy characterizes curiosity as the desire or the appetite to know something. Inspired by network theory, however, we pivot from the paradigm of curiosity as nodal acquisition to curiosity as edgework.

It is the edge that straddles the divide between the more-than-human and the simply human.

Perhaps we wish to understand curiosity simply because it is curious. It is strange, puzzling, and mystifying. We cock our head in a quizzical stare. What is this oddity before us?

Genesis begins, of course, with a story of creation and curiosity. The first woman, Eve, wants to partake of the one tree forbidden to her, representing the knowledge from which she and Adam are prohibited. Curious to know good and evil, she eats—that is, she reaches for, grasps, tugs, acquires, ingests, and consumes—a single piece of fruit from th

It is arguably true that Ole Worm’s desire to know led him to walk toward the artifact and subsequently led him to pick up the artifact to bring it back to his cabinet of curiosities. It is also true that the desire to know is said to arise in the mind. But can the mind be the cause of the desire to know?