How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
Interconnectedness is one of the basic principles of life. Transience is another. They both go together to form a multileveled dynamic web of connections between living processes. What results is an emergent and persistent higher-level order from constantly changing lower-level interactions. The singers change, but the song remains the same.
Understanding Living Systems
we persist in believing that, if we stay on the same path, we will eventually find those answers—instead of admitting that there is something wrong with our approach. Trapped within this paradigm, it is difficult to grasp the idea of something that reductionism cannot measure in its entirety.
T. Colin Campbell • Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition
The Beginning of Infinity
thebeginningofinfinity.xyz
The value (“fitness”) of a given combination of building blocks often cannot be predicted by a summing up of values assigned to the component blocks. This nonlinearity (commonly called epistasis in genetics) leads to co-adapted sets of blocks (alleles) that serve to bias sampling and add additional layers to the hierarchy.