Sublime

In a nutshell, the second law favors the emergence and persistence of increasingly complex and functional energy-extraction machines, and when those machines become sufficiently complex, we call them organisms. A 2017 paper coauthored by physicist Susanne Still calculates that the odds of life emerging on a planet increase significantly as the syst

Evolution does not select from an infinite palette: there are specific patterns and shapes in space and time that arise out of the complex and dynamic interactions between the components of biological systems, much as there are common features of cities or animal communities, or of crystal structures or galaxies.

While this theory is unsatisfactory because it attributes life to a literal miracle, the chance hypothesis is unsatisfactory because it relies on a statistical miracle.

If we are to address the wholesale despoliation of the planet, and our growing helplessness in the face of vast computational power, then we must find ways to reconcile our technological prowess and sense of human uniqueness with an earthy sensibility and an attentiveness to the interconnectedness of all things.

Instead of assuming agents were perfectly rational, we allowed there were limits to how smart they were. Instead of assuming the economy displayed diminishing returns (negative feedbacks), we allowed that it might also contain increasing returns (positive feedbacks). Instead of assuming the economy was a mechanistic system operating at equilibrium,

We’re still guided by what’s called the Copernican principle, the idea that in no realm should we take humanity to be special.

Progress there had been, the long record of life on Earth was indeed an upward path. The changes, however, had been achieved, he insisted, in great creative stages, these divided by momentous catastrophe. His doctrine, the cataclysmic theory of his own great master, Cuvier, was that all life on the planet had been destroyed repeatedly in order to s