Stuart Kauffman

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Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

However, if the bacterium suddenly finds itself in a glucose-free but lactose-rich environment, then lactose molecules bind to the lactose repressor and detach it from genes A, B, and C, which then proceed to produce the enzymes that allow lactose metabolism. Regulatory interactions like this, some much more intricate, are the heart and soul of complexity in genetics. Network thinking played a role in understanding these interactions as early as the 1960s, with the work of Stuart Kauffman (more on this in chapter 18). More recently, network scientists teaming up with geneticists have demonstrated evidence that at least some networks of these interactions are approximately scale-free. Here, the nodes are individual genes, and each node links to all other genes it regulates (if any).

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It’s possible that genomes vastly different from ours could result in new types of body plans, but in practice, evolution can’t get us there because we are so reliant on the existing regulatory genes. Our possibilities for evolution are constrained. According to Evo-Devo, the notion that “every trait can vary indefinitely” is wrong. Genetic Regulation and Kauffman’s “Origins of Order” Stuart Kauffman is a theoretical biologist who has been thinking about genetic regulatory networks and their role in constraining evolution for over forty years, long before the ascendency of Evo-Devo. He has also thought about the implications for evolution of the “order” we see emerging from such complex networks.

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At SFI seminars, Kauffman would sometimes chime in from the audience with, “I know I’m just a simple country doctor, but … ” and would spend a good five minutes or more fluently and eloquently giving his extemporaneous opinion on some highly technical topic that he had never thought about before. One science journalist called him a “world-class intellectual riffer,” which is an apt description that I interpret as wholly complimentary. Stuart Kauffman (Photograph by Daryl Black, reprinted with permission.) Stuart’s “simple country doctor” humble affect belies his personality. Kauffman is one of Complex Systems’ big thinkers, a visionary, and not what you would call a “modest” or “humble” person. A joke at SFI was that Stuart had “patented Darwinian evolution,” and indeed, he holds a patent on techniques for evolving protein sequences in the laboratory for the purpose of discovering new useful drugs.

Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer

3D printing, Albert Einstein, biofilm, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, discovery of DNA, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, knapsack problem, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Lyft, microbiome, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, uber lyft

If they wanted to figure out how planes fly, it would have been a waste of time to study a modern airliner. They’d get lost in video screens, call buttons, and snack carts. To discover the things that matter to flight itself, they’d be better off going to Kitty Hawk and studying the Wright Flyer, with its simple wings of spruce and ash. In the 1960s a medical student named Stuart Kauffman joined this tiny society. At the time, biologists were discovering some of the deep connections between genes and proteins that make life possible. They were finding that certain genes become active only if a certain protein lands on the DNA nearby. They found some of the links in the long chains of reactions that make metabolism possible.

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Only if they have a resilient structure—perhaps loops within its loops—can they withstand hard times when their ingredients run low. Scientists will have to settle questions such as these before autocatalytic sets can become part of a mature theory of life. Such a theory might explain how life sustains itself and perhaps even how it emerged in the first place. In 2019, Stuart Kauffman and two colleagues considered David Deamer’s scenario in which life started as RNA-based protocells in drying ponds. They made some rough estimates of the variety of RNA molecules that could have formed in such a pond. Kauffman and his colleagues concluded that a single pool could very well have produced an autocatalytic set of RNA molecules.

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They’ve created theories: In addition to autocatalytic sets and assembly theory, there are a number of other projects underway. See, for example, England 2020 and Palacios et al. 2020. Robert Rosen and Francisco Varela: Cornish-Bowden and Cárdenas 2020. compressed descriptions: Walker 2018. the essential conditions: Letelier, Cárdenas, and Cornish-Bowden 2011. Stuart Kauffman: Hordijk 2019; Kauffman 2019; Levy 1992. Oil is the product of catalysts: Johns 1979. sustain themselves: Mariscal et al. 2019. Reza Ghadiri: Ashkenasy et al. 2004. a mature theory of life: Hordijk, Shichor, and Ashkenasy 2018; Xavier et al. 2020. self-sustaining chemistry: Hordijk, Steel, and Kauffman 2019.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

If some biologists have habitually overlooked this requirement, they are making the same mistake as the art historians who ignore the building process of their monuments. Far from being too taken with an engineering mentality, they have not taken engineering questions seriously enough. 7. STUART KAUFFMAN AS META-ENGINEER Since Darwin, we have come to think of organisms as tinkered-together contraptions and selection as the sole source of order. Yet Darwin could not have begun to suspect the power of self-organization. We must seek our principles of adaptation in complex systems anew. — STUART KAUFFMAN, quoted in Ruthen 1993, p. 138 History tends to repeat itself. Today we all recognize that the rediscovery of Mendel's laws, and with them the concept of the gene as a unit of heredity, was the salvation of Darwinian thinking, but that was not how it appeared at the time.

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181 CHAPTER EIGHT Biology Is Engineering 187 1. The Sciences of the Artificial 187 2. Darwin Is Dead — Long Live Darwin! 190 3. Function and Specification 195 4. Original Sin and the Birth of Meaning 200 5. The Computer That Learned to Play Checkers 207 6. Artifact Hermeneutics, or Reverse Engineering 212 7. Stuart Kauffman as Meta-Engineer 220 {9} CHAPTER NINE Searching for Quality 1. The Power of Adaptationist Thinking 229 2. The Leibnizian Paradigm 238 3. Playing with Constraints 251 CHAPTER TEN Bully for Brontosaurus 262 1. The Boy Who Cried Wolf? 262 2. The Spandrel's Thumb 267 3. Punctuated Equilibrium: A Hopeful Monster 282 4.

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Some of the disputes I boldly adjudicate, and others I leave wide open but place in a framework so that you can see what the issues are, and whether it matters — to you — how they come out. I hope you will read this literature, for it is packed with wonderful ideas. Some of the books I cite are among the most difficult books I have ever read. I think of the books by Stuart Kauffman and Roger Penrose, for instance, but they are pedagogical tours deforce of highly advanced materials, and they can and should be read by anyone who wants to have an informed opinion about the important issues they raise. Others are less demanding — clear, informative, well worth some serious effort — and still others are not just easy to read but a great delight — superb examples of Art in the service of Science.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

Or Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru Kevin Roose, “The 2019 Good Tech Awards,” New York Times, December 30, 2019. Or Sasha Costanza-Chock Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (Boston: MIT Press, 2020). a term coined by the evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Sarah Bagley made history again Madeleine B. Stern, We the Women: Career Firsts of Nineteenth-Century America (Lincoln, Neb.: Bison Books, 1994). By Kevin Roose Futureproof Young Money The Unlikely Disciple About the Author Kevin Roose is a technology columnist for The New York Times.

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As we fight to shape today’s technological landscape, I think we have a special obligation to fight for the people who stand to lose the most from AI and automation, including historically marginalized communities and people who don’t have much of a safety net. I also think we need to resist the urge to push the AI conversation too far into the future. I’ve always loved the concept of the “adjacent possible,” a term coined by the evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman to describe the way biological organisms evolve in gradual, incremental steps. The adjacent possible is a useful concept to apply to the world of technology, because it takes us out of the realm of sci-fi and narrows our scope to more realistic outcomes. A world in which robots flawlessly perform all human labor, freeing us all up to make art and play video games every day, is probably not part of the adjacent possible.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

Instead of seeing each individual as selfish and competitive, seeking only personal advantage, it offers a more nuanced understanding of humanity as also cooperative and altruistic, embedded within larger social and natural networks.41 Scientists at the forefront of systems thinking recognize the far-reaching ramifications of their findings. “We are seeking a new conceptual framework that does not yet exist,” writes researcher Stuart Kauffman. However, while this view of nature is relatively new in science, we have seen in this book how earlier cultures have already explored many of the philosophical implications of a connected cosmos. The wisdom of indigenous worldviews shares much with systems thinking, and the Neo-Confucian investigation of the li—the organizing principles of the universe—offers deep insights to modernity, with its understanding of the Tao as the metapattern of all nature's principles, discoverable in one's own nature as well as in the natural world.42 Remarkably, though, many people today remain unaware of this alternative way of understanding nature.

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I am indebted to other notable scholars whose insights helped shape this book into its particular pattern of meaning, particularly Sir Geoffrey Lloyd, Nathan Sivin, Jared Diamond, Merlin Donald, Terrence Deacon, Steve Mithen, Michael Tomasello, Thomas McEvilley, Bruce Trigger, Robert Wright, Edward Slingerland, David Anthony, Richard Nisbett, Christopher Boehm, Stuart Kauffman, Evan Thompson, and Joseph Tainter. I have received helpful feedback and encouragement from leaders in their fields regarding particular chapters that I have shared with them over the years, including Fritjof Capra, Sir Geoffrey Lloyd, David Korten, Nathan Sivin, Paul Ekman, Yair Lior, Sun Yue, Sir Michael Atiyah, and Jerry Feldman.

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George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), 3, 145–46. See, in particular, chapter 15, “Contrasting Metaphors of Nature,” for more detail on this and other core metaphors of nature and their historical impact. 18. Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism, 3. 19. Ibid., 3–5. For a more in-depth understanding of complex systems, see Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Ricard Solé and Brian Goodwin, Signs of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 20.

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

In this view, “life emerges from a soup in the same dependable way that a crystal emerges from a saturated solution, with its final from predetermined by the interatomic forces.” Cyril Ponnamperuma, an early pioneer in biogenesis (the study of the origin of life), believed “there are inherent properties in the atoms and molecules which seem to direct the synthesis” toward life. Theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman believes his exhaustive computer simulations of prebiotic networks demonstrate that when conditions are right, the emergence of life is inevitable. Our existence here, he says, is a case of “not we the accidental but we the expected.” Mathematician Manfred Eigen wrote in 1971, “The evolution of life, if it is based on a derivable physical principle, must be considered an inevitable process.”

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Mathematician John Conway proposed a proof arguing that neither the mathematics of randomness nor the logic of determinism can properly explain the sudden (why right now?) decay or shift of spin direction in cosmic particles. The only mathematical or logical option left is free will. The particle simply chooses in a way that is indistinguishable from the tiniest quantum bit of free will. Theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman argues that this “free will” is a result of the mysterious quantum nature of the universe, by which quantum particles can be two places at once, or be both wave and particle at once. Kauffman points out that when physicists shoot photons of light (which are wave/particles) through two tiny parallel slits (a famous experiment), the photon can pass through only as either a wave or a particle, but not both.

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Of course, any errors in transmitting their thoughts are mine. Chris Anderson Gordon Bell Katy Borner Stewart Brand Eric Brende David Brin Rob Carlson James Carse Jamais Cascio Richard Dawkins Eric Drexler Freeman Dyson George Dyson Niles Eldredge Brian Eno Joel Garreau Paul Hawken Danny Hillis Piet Hut Derrick Jensen Bill Joy Stuart Kauffman Donald Kraybill Mark Kryder Ray Kurzweil Jaron Lanier Pierre Lemonnier Seth Lloyd Lori Marino Max More Simon Conway Morris Nathan Myhrvold Howard Rheingold Paul Saffo Kirkpatrick Sale Tim Sauder Peter Schwartz John Smart Lee Smolin Alex Steffen Steve Talbot Edward Tenner Sherry Turkle Hal Varian Vernor Vinge Jay Walker Peter Warshall Robert Wright Annotated Reading List Of the hundreds of books I consulted for this project, I found the following selected ones to be the most useful for my purposes.

Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum by Lee Smolin

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, Turing machine

Then I want very much to thank those who have become friends through our shared work on foundational problems: Stephon Alexander, Giovanni Amelino-Camelia, Abhay Ashtekar, Eli Cohen, Marina Cortês, Louis Crane, John Dell, Avshalom Elitzur, Laurent Freidel, Sabine Hossenfelder, Ted Jacobson, Stuart Kauffman, Jurek Kowalski-Glikman, Andrew Liddle, Renate Loll, João Magueijo, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Fotini Markopoulou, and Carlo Rovelli. The book has been very much improved by feedback from Krista Blake, Saint Clair Cemin, Dina Graser, Jaron Lanier, and Donna Moylan. I also want to thank Kaća Bradonjić for the illustrations and for many wise and helpful suggestions on the text. For helpful conversations and correspondence on specific points, I must thank Jim Baggott, Julian Barbour, Freeman Dyson, Olival Freire, Stuart Kauffman, Michael Nielsen, Philip Pearle, Bill Poirier, Carlo Rovelli, and John Stachel.

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* * * — SEVERAL WRITERS, beginning with Heisenberg and including my teacher Abner Shimony, have proposed that the world of the possible has to be included as part of reality—because in quantum physics the possible influences the future of the actual. This view has been recently developed by my friend Stuart Kauffman, in collaboration with Ruth Kastner and Michael Epperson.7 There is no way to describe this view that doesn’t cause some tension with ordinary language usage, but keep an open mind and I’ll aim to be clear. We start by stating that there are two ways for a circumstance to be real. It can be actual, which means that it is part of the world in the same way that a Newtonian particle has a definite position.

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,” Journal of Mathematical Physics 36, no. 11 (May 1995): 6180–93, arXiv:gr-qc/9504038; Carlo Rovelli, “Relational Quantum Mechanics,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 35, no. 8 (August 1996): 1637–78, arXiv:quant-ph/9609002; Lee Smolin, “The Bekenstein Bound, Topological Quantum Field Theory and Pluralistic Quantum Cosmology” (1995), arXiv:gr-qc/9508064. 7. Ruth E. Kastner, Stuart Kauffman, and Michael Epperson, “Taking Heisenberg’s Potentia Seriously” (2017), arXiv:1709.03595. 8. Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 9. Henrique de A. Gomes, “Back to Parmenides” (2016, 2018), arXiv:1603.01574. Chapter 13: Lessons 1.

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough by Peter Barnes

adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, banks create money, basic income, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Money creation, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stuart Kauffman, the map is not the territory, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy

The reason for this punctuated pattern seems to be that complex systems live near equilibrium but never quite at it. They hover in a zone between equilibrium and chaos, and every once in a while a crisis pushes them toward (or over) the chaotic edge. At such times, they either collapse or shift into what biologist Stuart Kauffman calls the “adjacent possible.”3 The adjacent possible isn’t simply whatever happens next. Rather, it’s a set of potential futures in which modified versions of the existing system lurk. Which of these versions eventually emerges is inherently unpredictable. But when the system includes humans, it’s possible for humans to affect the outcome.

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Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1942). 2. Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, “Punctuated equilibria: An alternative to phyletic gradualism,” in T. J. M. Schopf, ed., Models in Paleobiology (San Francisco: Freeman Cooper, 1972, 82—115, http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/clas-sictexts/eldredge.pdf. 3. Stuart Kauffman, Investigations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 4. Baker v. Carr, 369 US 186 (1962). 5. Zobel v. Williams, 457 US 55 (1982). 6. The term “pre-distribution” was first used, as best I can determine, by Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker, in a 2011 essay, “The institutional foundations of middle-class democracy,” which is well worth reading; http://www.policy-network.net/pno_detail.aspx?

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

“not worth a damn”: Michael Chorost, “Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 13, 2013, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Where-Thomas-Nagel-Went-Wrong/139129. such as physicist Paul Davies and biologist Stuart Kauffman: Davies, Goldilocks Enigma; Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life (London: Allen Lane, 2019); Stuart Kauffman, “Beyond the Stalemate,” Cornell University, arXiv.org, https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.2127v2; Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 2008). “the most certain thing . . . I was mocked”: Author interview with Galen Strawson in Chalk Farm, London, August 13, 2019.

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In 2012, the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel complained in his book Mind and Cosmos that the conventional mix of materialism and Darwinism “is incapable of providing an adequate account . . . of our universe.” He was widely criticized for it—Steven Pinker tweeted that the book exposed “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker,” while Dennett said it was “not worth a damn”—but Nagel’s not alone. High-profile scientists, too, such as physicist Paul Davies and biologist Stuart Kauffman, reject the idea of a supernatural God but have questioned whether cosmic puzzles such as fine-tuning and consciousness can really be dismissed as random accidents. Davies, Kauffman and others have suggested that the laws of physics as we know them might not explain everything. Maybe there’s some extra principle, yet to be discovered, that has been nudging the universe toward complexity, so that life and consciousness could arise.

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Some believe that it may be that natural systems intrinsically evolve to the edge of chaos, and in fact that an emergent edge of chaos behaviour, rather than the ‘survival of the fittest’ is the real defining quality of systems that are alive. SFI researcher, doctor and theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman is a prominent proponent of this theory, and has focused his research on the nature of living systems. His early work appears in the 1993 book Origins of Order,6 which considers the complexity of behaviour of networks of actors. For Kauffman, those actors could be small chemical reactions in a primordial soup at the origins of life, which, by chance, come to self-reinforce one another.

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Edge of chaos complexity has revealed a new reality: that we cannot characterize the world and the phenomena around us algorithmically, neither as merely deterministic sets of rules nor purely random rolls of the dice. This complexity is unpredictable, yet it has patterns; unpredictable patterns may in fact be a characteristic of systems that we would call living systems. Stuart Kauffman has used mathematical models to show that living systems tend to evolve towards an edge of chaos: that point where their behaviour is maximally random while maintaining some structure. Existing at this edge allows the evolving system to retain the maximum number of adjacent possible states that it can change to at any moment, while still maintaining stable behaviours.

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A human individual is an enormously capital-C Complex system, as are our societies. Human beings, as far as we can tell, operate according to the laws of physics, but complexity science tells us that this does not mean they are reducible, particularly to mere computations. There is no faith required to believe that humans are irreducible, that complexity really matters. Stuart Kauffman, in particular, deals with this fact in his book Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion,2 where he discusses that complexity is what separates the science of today from the simplistic rationalism of the scientific past. That rationalism precisely describes algorithmic models, and it is what makes them tend towards bias (simplification) and polarity (optimization).

The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Claude Shannon: information theory, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jim Simons, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, martingale, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, power law, prediction markets, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

Around the same time, he began to work with other researchers interested in bringing ideas from physics to bear on economics, including Mike Brown, the first CFO of Microsoft and a former chair of the NASDAQ board, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose, an influential accounting professor working at the SEC, and Stuart Kauffman, who had worked on complex systems theory at the Santa Fe Institute, alongside Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard before they started the Prediction Company. In September 2008, Weinstein visited Perimeter a second time, for a conference on science in the twenty-first century. The talks focused on ways in which scientific research was changing with new funding sources, with new means of disseminating ideas, such as blogs and online conferences, and with new ideas about where research should and could happen, with places like Perimeter and the Santa Fe Institute becoming centers of study outside of the traditional university.

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The paper was a kind of translation dictionary, explaining basic economics to physicists and then showing how ideas that physicists were already comfortable with could be applied to this otherwise foreign science. Meanwhile, Smolin and Weinstein began working with Smolin's other collaborators — Mike Brown, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose, and Stuart Kauffman — to organize a conference at Perimeter. It was scheduled for May 2009. The plan was to invite representatives from across the spectrum of economics, to bring together a diverse and heterodox group of people to discuss how to move the field forward after the recent crisis. In addition to the organizers, Doyne Farmer and Emanuel Derman participated.

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“An Observational Test of the Critical Earthquake Concept.” Journal of Geophysical Research 103: 24359–72. Broad, William J. 1992. “Defining the New Plowshares Those Old Swords Will Make.” The New York Times, February 5. Brooks, David. 2010. “The Return of History.” The New York Times, March 26, A27. Brown, Mike, Stuart Kauffman, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose, and Lee Smolin. 2008. “Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?” Available, with a response from Weinstein, at http://www.edge.org/conversation/can-science-help-solve-the-economic-crisis. Brown, Robert. 1828. “A Brief Account of Microscopical Observations Made on the Particles Contained in the Pollen of Plants.”

So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport

adjacent possible, Apple II, bounce rate, business cycle, Byte Shop, Cal Newport, capital controls, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, deal flow, deliberate practice, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge worker, Mason jar, medical residency, new economy, passive income, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, renewable energy credits, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Bolles, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, web application, winner-take-all economy

I ask, however, that you stick with me, as the explanation for this phenomenon is the first link in a chain of logic that helped me decode what Pardis did differently than Sarah and Jane. Big ideas, Johnson explained, are almost always discovered in the “adjacent possible,” a term borrowed from the complex-system biologist Stuart Kauffman, who used it to describe the spontaneous formation of complex chemical structures from simpler structures. Given a soup of chemical components sloshing and mixing together, noted Kauffman, lots of new chemicals will form. Not every new chemical, however, is equally likely. The new chemicals you’ll find are those that can be made by combining the structures already in the soup.

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It provides a unifying goal for your career. It’s more general than a specific job and can span multiple positions. It provides an answer to the question “What should I do with my life?” the adjacent possible (introduced in Rule #4): A term taken from the science writer Steven Johnson, who took it from Stuart Kauffman, that helps explain the origin of innovation. Johnson notes that the next big ideas in any field are typically found right beyond the current cutting edge, in the adjacent space that contains the possible new combinations of existing ideas. The key observation is that you have to get to the cutting edge of a field before its adjacent possible—and the innovations it contains—becomes visible.

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Ford Model T, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population

It would be a chemical transistor. In an awfully crude way this chemical system models a primitive metabolism. In an even cruder way, it is a model of a cell differentiating from one cell type to another—the cell types can be viewed abstractly as the dynamic steady states of these systems, as the complex systems biologist Stuart Kauffman suggested decades ago.14 Highly interacting out-of-equilibrium systems, whether they are trees reacting to the change of seasons or chemical systems processing information about the inputs they receive, teach us that matter can compute. These systems tell us that computation precedes the origins of life just as much as information does.

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Technically this is known as a bifurcation. It occurs in systems that have nonlinearities, which come from the fact that the production of some intermediate compounds {M} or outputs {O} require, respectively, combinations of inputs {I} and intermediate states {M}. 14. This is one of the central ideas described in Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and it is an implication of his model of random Boolean networks. 15. For a more detailed explanation, see Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, and Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature (New York: Free Press, 1997).

The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur

Andrew Wiles, Boeing 747, business process, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, creative destruction, double helix, endogenous growth, financial engineering, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, haute cuisine, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, locking in a profit, Mars Rover, means of production, Myron Scholes, power law, punch-card reader, railway mania, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, technological singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

We need challenge, we need meaning, we need purpose, we need alignment with nature. Where technology separates us from these it brings a type of death. But where it enhances these, it affirms life. It affirms our humanness. NOTES Preface 2 Technologies in other… combinations: I discussed this idea with Stuart Kauffman in 1987. Kauffman has since followed up with further thoughts on the self-creating aspect of technology in several of his writings. 4 beautiful case studies… historians: See in particular Aitken, Constant, Hughes, Landes, Rhodes, and Tomayko. Chapter 1: Questions 9 monkey with tiny electrodes: Meel Velliste, et al.

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Brid Arthur helped me plan the flow of the book, and Niamh Arthur helped edit the final draft. One of the joys of the project has been the company of friends and colleagues who have provided intellectual stimulation and moral support over the years. I thank in particular Cormac McCarthy and my SFI co-conspirator David Lane; also Kenneth Arrow, Jim Baker, John Seely Brown, Stuart Kauffman, Bill Miller, Michael Mauboussin, Richard Palmer, Wolfgang Polak, Nathan Rosenberg, Paul Saffo, Martin Shubik, Jan Vasbinder, and Jitendra Singh. Not least, I am deeply grateful to my partner, Runa Bouius, for her patience and support during the time this book was being written. INDEX accounting, 85, 153, 197 agriculture, 10, 25, 154, 196 air inlet system, 40, 41 Airbus, 91 aircraft, 7, 10, 22, 182 design of, 72–73, 77, 91, 92–94, 108, 111–12, 120, 133, 136–37 detection of, 22, 39, 49, 73–74, 132 navigation and control of, 25, 30, 72–73, 93–94, 96, 108, 111–12, 132, 206 people and cargo processed by, 30, 32, 92–94 piston-and-propeller, 108, 111, 113, 120, 140–41 propulsion of, 108, 111–12, 120 radar surveillance, 41 stealth, 39–42 see also jet engines; specific aircraft aircraft carriers, 39–42 air traffic control, 132 algorithms, 6, 24, 25, 50, 53, 55, 80, 167, 178, 180–81, 206 digital compression, 28 sorting, 17, 30–31, 98 speech recognition, 28 text-processing, 153 altruism, 142 amplifiers, 69, 83, 167–68 analog systems, 71 anatomy, 13, 14, 32, 43 animals, 9, 53 bones and organs of, 13, 45, 187 genus of, 13 natural selection among, 16 see also vertebrates; specific animals archaeology, 45–46, 88 archaeomagnetic dating, 45 Architectural Digest, 175 architecture, 10, 32, 35, 41–42, 71, 73, 79, 81, 84, 98, 101, 116, 212–13 arithmetic, 81, 108, 125, 182 Armstrong oscillator, 102, 130 Arpanet, 156 artificial intelligence, 12, 215 arts, 15, 72, 77, 79 see also music; painting; poetry Astronomical Society, 74 astronomy, 47–50, 74 Atanasoff-Berry machine, 87 Atomic Energy Commission, U.S., 104 atomic power, 10, 24, 80, 103–5, 114–15, 160, 200 automobiles, 2, 10, 176, 180 autopoiesis, 2–3, 21, 24, 59, 167–70, 188 Babbage, Charles, 74, 75, 126 bacteria, 10, 119, 148, 207 banking, 149, 153–55, 192, 201, 209 bar-codes, 48 barges, 81–83 barometers, 47 batteries, 58, 59, 63 Bauhaus architecture, 212 beekeeping, 25 Bernoulli effect, 52 Bessemer process, 14, 75, 152, 153 biochemistry, 61, 119–20, 123–24, 147 biology, 10, 13, 16, 17, 18, 53, 54, 147–48, 187–88 evolution and, 13, 16, 107, 127–28, 188, 204 molecular, 147, 161, 188 technology and, 28, 61, 206–8 BIOS chip, 13 Black, Fischer, 154 black-bellied plover (pluvialis squatarola), 31 black box concept, 14, 18, 178 blacksmithing, 180 Boeing 737, 96 Boeing 747, 92–94, 109 Boeing 787, 32 bones, 13, 45, 187–88 Boot, Henry, 113 bows, 171 Boyer, Herbert, 148 brain: imaging of, 10 implanting electrodes in, 9 mental processes of, 9, 23, 56, 97, 112, 121–22, 193 parts of, 9, 10, 56, 208 bridges, 29, 109, 150 cable-stayed, 31, 70, 91 concrete, 99–100 bridging technologies, 83–84 bronze, 185 Brown, John Seely, 210 buildings, 47 design and construction of, 10, 71, 72 business, 54, 148, 149, 192, 205 practices of, 80–81, 83, 153, 157, 158–59, 209 Butler, Paul, 47–48, 49–50 Butler, Samuel, 16, 17 cables, 31, 70, 91 fiber optic, 69, 83 calculating devices, 74 canals, 81–83, 85, 150, 192 canoes, 16, 171 capacitors, 59, 69, 169 carbon-14, 45 carrier: air wing, 40, 42 battlegroup, 40–41 Cathcart, Brian, 160 cathedrals, 10 cathode-ray tubes, 57, 59 Cavendish Laboratory, 160 cavity magnetron, 113 Chain, Ernst, 120 Chargaff, Erwin, 77 chemistry, 25, 57, 66, 69, 159, 202, 205 industrial, 75, 162, 171 polymer, 162 Chicago Board of Trade, 156 “chunking,” 36–37, 50 clocks, 33, 36, 38, 49, 158, 198 atomic, 24, 206 cloning, 70 cloud chamber, 61 coal, 82, 83 Cockburn, Lord, 149 Cohen, Stanley, 148 combustion systems, 17, 19, 34, 50, 52, 53, 120 common sense, 65 communication, 66, 78 see also language; telecommunications compressors, 18–19, 34, 51–52, 65, 136–37, 168 computers, 10, 28, 33, 64, 71–73, 75, 80–81, 82, 85, 96, 153–55, 181–83, 203 evolution of, 87, 108–9, 125–26, 146, 150–51, 159, 168–69, 171 intrinsic capabilities of, 88–89 operating systems of, 12–13, 34–35, 36, 72–73, 79–80, 88, 108–9, 150, 156 programming of, 34–35, 53, 71, 88–89 see also algorithms; Internet computer science, 38, 98 concrete, 10, 73, 99–100 contracts, 54, 55, 153–54, 193, 201 derivatives, 154–55, 209 cooling systems, 103–4, 134–35 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 61 copper, 9, 58 cotton, 139, 196 Crick, Francis, 58, 61 Crooke’s tube, 57 Cuvier, Georges, 13 cyclotron, 115, 131 Darwin, Charles, 16, 17–18, 89, 102–3, 107, 127–28, 129, 132, 138, 142, 188, 203–4 “Darwin Among the Machines” (Butler), 16 Darwin’s mechanism, 18, 89, 138 data, 50, 146, 153 processing of, 70, 80–81, 83, 151 dating technologies, 45–46 David, Paul, 157–58 Dawkins, Richard, 102 deep craft, 159–60, 162, 164 de Forest, Lee, 167–68 Deligne, Pierre, 129 dendrochronology, 45 Descartes, René, 208, 211 diabetes, 175 Dickens, Charles, 197 digital technologies, 25, 28, 66, 71, 72, 79–80, 80–81, 82, 84, 117–18, 145, 154, 156, 206 “Digitization and the Economy” (Arthur), 4 DNA, 24, 77, 85, 169, 208 amplification of, 37, 70, 123–24 complementary base pairing in, 57–58, 61, 123–24 extraction and purification of, 61, 70 microarrays, 85 recombinant, 10, 148 replication of, 147 sequencing of, 6, 37, 70, 123–24 domaining, 71–76 definition of, 71–72 redomaining and, 72–74, 85, 151–56 domains, 69–85, 103, 108, 145–65, 171 choice of, 71–73, 101 deep knowledge of, 78–79 definitions of, 70, 80, 84, 145 discipline-based, 146 economy and, 149, 151–56, 163 effectiveness of, 75–76, 150 evolution and development of, 72, 84, 85, 88, 145–65 languages and grammar of, 69, 76–80, 147 mature, 149–50, 165 morphing of, 150–51 novel, 74–75, 152–53 styles defined by, 74–76 subdomains and sub-subdomains of, 71, 151, 165 worlds of, 80–85 Doppler effect, 48, 122 dynamo, 14 Eckert, J.

The Strange Order of Things: The Biological Roots of Culture by Antonio Damasio

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, biofilm, business process, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double helix, Gordon Gekko, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, invisible hand, job automation, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, post-truth, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, Thomas Malthus

This process achieved two feats: a centrally organized mode of internal life regulation and a mode of genetic transmission of life that superseded simple cell division. The perfecting of the double-tasked genetic machinery would not have stopped since. This version of life’s beginning has been persuasively articulated by Freeman Dyson and is favored by a number of chemists, physicists, and biologists, among them J. B. S. Haldane, Stuart Kauffman, Keith Baverstock, Christian de Duve, and P. L. Luisi. The autonomy of the process, the fact that life is generated from “within,” self-started and self-maintained in all of its aspects, was also well captured by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in the process that they named autopoiesis.11 Curiously, on the metabolism-first account, homeostasis “tells” the cell, as it were, to do its business as perfectly as possible so that the cell’s life can persist.

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Sutherland, “Towards an Evolutionary Theory of the Origin of Life Based on Kinetics and Thermodynamics,” Open Biology 3, no. 11 (2013): 130156; Arto Annila and Keith Baverstock, “Genes Without Prominence: A Reappraisal of the Foundations of Biology,” Journal of the Royal Society Interface 11, no. 94 (2014): 20131017; Keith Baverstock and Mauno Rönkkö, “The Evolutionary Origin of Form and Function,” Journal of Physiology 592, no. 11 (2014): 2261–65; Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo, Carlos Briones, and Andrés de la Escosura, “Prebiotic Systems Chemistry: New Perspectives for the Origins of Life,” Chemical Reviews 114, no. 1 (2014): 285–366; Paul G. Higgs and Niles Lehman, “The RNA World: Molecular Cooperation at the Origins of Life,” Nature Reviews Genetics 16, no. 1 (2015): 7–17; Stuart Kauffman, “What Is Life?,” Israel Journal of Chemistry 55, no. 8 (2015): 875–79; Abe Pressman, Celia Blanco, and Irene A. Chen, “The RNA World as a Model System to Study the Origin of Life,” Current Biology 25, no. 19 (2015): R953–R963; Jan Spitzer, Gary J. Pielak, and Bert Poolman, “Emergence of Life: Physical Chemistry Changes the Paradigm,” Biology Direct 10, no. 33 (2015); Arto Annila and Keith Baverstock, “Discourse on Order vs.

Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo by Sean B. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Brownian motion, classic study, dark matter, Drosophila, Gregor Mendel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method

Drawings and notes from the notebooks of explorer-naturalist Henry Walter Bates. COMPOSED BY JOSH KLAISS 8 How the Butterfly Got Its Spots “Evolution is chance caught on the wing.” —Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe , paraphrasing a translation of Jacques Monod in Chance and Necessity A FTER ELEVEN YEARS in the Amazon, having collected 14,712 different animal species (8000 of which were new to science), his body wracked by tropical disease, poor nutrition, and prolonged exposure to sun and heat, and having endured robbery, abandonment by servants, and other deprivations, Henry Walter Bates left the jungle for England in June 1859.

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In Le Hasard et la Nécessité (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), Monod wrote, “Hasard capté, conserve, reproduit per la machinerie de l’invariance et ainsi converti en ordre, régle, nécessité” (p. 128). His English-language translator, Austryn Wainhouse, chose to translate “hasard capté” as “randomness caught on the wing,” but more literally it would be “chance [or, randomness] captured.” Stuart Kauffman, in At Home in the Universe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), first quotes Monod as saying “chance caught on the wing” (p. 71) and later extends the quote to “Evolution is chance caught on the wing” (p. 97). A wonderful phrase, well worth quoting, but neither Monod nor his translator ever wrote it.

The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

The goal was to develop new ways to understand systems like those found in living things, systems more complex than those of physics and chemistry. Unlike the simplicity of how rockets move, which follows Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, there was no simple way to describe how a tree grows. Computer algorithms were used by a colorful group of pioneers to explore these age-old questions about living things. Stuart Kauffman was trained as a physician and became intrigued with gene networks in which proteins called “transcription factors” target genes and influence whether or not they are activated.6 His models were selforganizing and based on networks of binary units that were similar in some respects to neural networks but on much slower timescales.

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It has since been elaborated with many layers of algorithms to manipulate the bias on searches. 5. A. D. I. Kramer, J. E. Guillory, and J. T. Hancock, “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111, no. 24 (2014): 8788–8790. 6. Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 7. Christopher G. Langton, ed., Artificial Life: An Overview (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 8. Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science (Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media, 2002). 9. National Research Council, The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2007), chap. 5, “Origin of Life,” 53–68. https://www.nap.edu/read/11919/chapter/7. 10.

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Third, mimicking a competitor’s entire set of connected decisions was nearly impossible, since that could quickly get overwhelmingly complex. And even if a rival imitated most aspects of a firm and missed a mere handful, it might still fail. While these authors were crafting their ideas, researchers in distant fields—Jay Forrester in systems dynamics, Stuart Kauffman in evolutionary biology—were making similar contributions. They approached the same problem in different ways: Some invoked formal mathematical models and simulations, others relied on logical consistency and inductive inference. But the central message in all their works was the same. And as it applied to business strategy, this message was as follows: Organizational choices are connected.

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“when the decisions that embody” Jan Rivkin, “Imitation of Complex Strategies,” Management Science 46, no. 6 (June 2000): 824–44. researchers in distant fields I am grateful to Jan Rivkin for an interview in February 2014. See Jay Forrester, “Systems Dynamics and the Lessons of 35 Years,” in Kenyon De Greene, ed., A Systems-Based Approach to Policy Making (New York: Springer, 1993); Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); S. Kauffman and S. A. Johnsen, “Co-Evolution to the Edge of Chaos: Coupled Fitness Landscapes, Poised States, and Co-Evolutionary Avalanches,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 149 (1991): 467–505.

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all. —Stuart Kauffman As I discussed earlier, an evolutionary algorithm involves a simulated environment in which simulated software “creatures” compete for survival and the right to reproduce. Each software creature represents a possible solution to a problem encoded in its digital “DNA.” The creatures allowed to survive and reproduce into the next generation are the ones that do a better job of solving the problem.

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These three sources discuss the exponential growth of computing. 21 A mathematical theory concerning the difference between information and noise and the ability of a communications channel to carry information. 22 The Santa Fe Institute has played a pioneering role in developing concepts and technology related to complexity and emergent systems. One of the principal developers of paradigms associated with chaos and complexity has been Stuart Kauffman. Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) looks “at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos” (from the card catalog description).In his book Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), John Tyler Bonner asks the question: “How is it that an egg turns into an elaborate adult?

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, digital Maoism, Douglas Hofstadter, Extropian, follow your passion, General Magic , hive mind, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Conway, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Long Term Capital Management, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Project Xanadu, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, social graph, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

The need to interoperate more tightly with the “dumbness” of software could help them undertake their work more clearly and safely. Furthermore, this sort of transaction representation has already been done internally within some of the more sophisticated hedge funds. Computer science is mature enough to take this problem on. * Some of my collaborators in this research include Paul Borrill, Jim Herriot, Stuart Kauffman, Bruce Sawhill, Lee Smolin, and Eric Weinstein. PART THREE The Unbearable Thinness of Flatness THREE WARNINGS have been presented in the previous chapters, conveying my belief that cybernetic totalism will ultimately be bad for spirituality, morality, and business. In my view, people have often respected bits too much, resulting in a creeping degradation of their own qualities as human beings.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

For thousands of years, the idea of making artificial cold had been almost unthinkable to human civilization. We invented agriculture and cities and aqueducts and the printing press, but cold was outside the boundaries of possibility for all those years. And yet somehow artificial cold became imaginable in the middle of the nineteenth century. To use the wonderful phrase of the complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman, cold became part of the “adjacent possible” of that period. How do we explain this breakthrough? It’s not just a matter of a solitary genius coming up with a brilliant invention because he or she is smarter than everyone else. And that’s because ideas are fundamentally networks of other ideas.

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life by J. Craig Venter

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Asilomar, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bioinformatics, borderless world, Brownian motion, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, epigenetics, experimental subject, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine

has gone on to influence generations of biologists. (Fifty years after he had delivered these remarkable talks, Michael P. Murphy and Luke A. J. O’Neill, of Trinity, celebrated the anniversary by inviting outstanding scientists from a range of disciplines—a prestigious guest list that included Jared Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould, Stuart Kauffman, John Maynard Smith, Roger Penrose, Lewis Wolpert, and the Nobel laureates Christian de Duve and Manfred Eigen—to predict what the next half-century might hold.) I have read What Is Life? on at least five different occasions, and each time, depending on the stage of my career, its message has taken on different meanings along with new salience and significance.

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment by Guy Spier

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, book value, Checklist Manifesto, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, NetJets, pattern recognition, pre–internet, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, two and twenty, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior by David Hawkins Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart by Gerd Gigerenzer and Peter Todd The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions by Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are by Daniel Siegel The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio Damasio The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain by Louis Cozolino There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives by Robert Hopcke Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Peter Levine with Ann Frederick Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney Science At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity by Stuart Kauffman Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity by John Gribbin Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality by Per Bak Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O.

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

adjacent possible, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive load, computer age, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, delayed gratification, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, invention of writing, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, market bubble, mass immigration, microbiome, Mitch Kapor, persistent metabolic adaptation, Peter Thiel, post-truth, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, vertical integration

This pattern applies to Facebook (which connected an existing web infrastructure with technology enabling people to build digital networks and share media) and Instagram (which linked Facebook’s most basic concepts with a smartphone application complete with the capacity to modify a photo with digital filters) and beyond. Recombination is the leitmotiv of digital innovation. With each new combination, fresh combinations loom into the terrain of what the biologist Stuart Kauffman calls ‘the adjacent possible’. New prospects open up, new vistas come into view. ‘Digital innovation is recombinant innovation in its purest form,’ Brynjolfsson and McAfee write. ‘Each development becomes a building block for future innovations . . . building blocks don’t ever get used up. In fact, they increase the opportunities for future recombinations.’15 But this leaves us with a critical question.

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded) by Michael J. Mauboussin

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, complexity theory, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, framing effect, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, Murray Gell-Mann, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, statistical model, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Stuart Kauffman, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Mauboussin and Kristen Bartholdson, “Puggy Pearson’s Prescription,” The Consilient Observer 1, no. 11 (June 4, 2002). 5 Kathleen M. Eisenhardt and Donald N. Sull, “Strategy as Simple Rules,” Harvard Business Review (January 2001): 107-16. 23. Survival of the Fittest 1 Dan Goodgame, “The Game of Risk: How the Best Golfer in the World Got Even Better,” Time, August 14, 2000. 2 Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 3 Steve Maguire, “Strategy Is Design: A Fitness Landscape Framework,” Managing Complexity in Organizations: A View in Many Directions (Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 1999), 67-104. 4 Eric D. Beinhocker, “Robust Adaptive Strategies,” Sloan Management Review 40, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 95-106. 5 Daniel C.

Busy by Tony Crabbe

airport security, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, death from overwork, fear of failure, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gamification, haute cuisine, informal economy, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, loss aversion, low cost airline, machine readable, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, scientific management, Shai Danziger, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple

“First break all the rules,” The Economist (April 10, 2010), http://www.economist.com/node/15879359. 4. Aza Raskin, “You Are Solving the Wrong Problem,” UX Magazine, (May 2, 2011), http://uxmag.com/articles/you-are-solving-the-wrong-problem. 5. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: Harper Perennial, 1997). 6. Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 7. Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. Chapter 7: Busy Is a Terrible Brand (Develop a Better Brand) 1.

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, Columbine, cotton gin, demographic transition, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, impulse control, life extension, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, presumed consent, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Turing test, twin studies

When it comes to higher-order conditions and behaviors, such as intelligence, aggression, sexuality, and the like, we know nothing more today than that there is some degree of genetic causation, from studies in behavior genetics. We have no idea what genes are ultimately responsible, but suspect that the causal relationships are extraordinarily complex. In the words of Stuart Kauffman, founder and chief scientific officer of BiosGroup, these genes are “some kind of parallel-processing chemical computer in which genes are continuously turning one another on and off in some vastly complex network of interaction. Cell-signaling pathways are linked to genetic regulatory pathways in ways we’re just beginning to unscramble.”4 The first step toward giving parents greater control over the genetic makeup of their children will come not from genetic engineering but with preimplantation genetic diagnosis and screening.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, endowment effect, facts on the ground, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, out of africa, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, trolley problem

If we were to work out a complete physics of neurons and their chemicals, would that elucidate the mind? Probably not. The brain presumably does not break the laws of physics, but that does not mean that equations describing detailed biochemical interactions will amount to the correct level of description. As the complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman puts it, “A couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine are, in real fact, a couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine, not mere particles in motion.” A meaningful theory of human biology cannot be reduced to chemistry and physics, but instead must be understood in its own vocabulary of evolution, competition, reward, desire, reputation, avarice, friendship, trust, hunger, and so on—in the same way that traffic flow will be understood not in the vocabulary of screws and spark plugs, but instead in terms of speed limits, rush hours, road rage, and people wanting to get home to their families as soon as possible when their workday is over.

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

I spent a very enjoyable eight years at San Diego State University, whose historians provided both support and smart insights into how this new approach to history might play out in the diverse academic communities of the United States and whose graduate students proved to be remarkably disciplined and skilled tutors in big history. Many experts in different fields have offered new insights or course corrections; they include Lawrence Krauss, Charles Lineweaver, Stuart Kauffman, Ann McGrath, Iain McCalman, Will Steffen, Jan Zalasiewicz, and many, many more. I have received immense support and rich feedback from my editors at Little, Brown, and at Penguin: Tracy Behar, Charlie Conrad, and Laura Stickney. I thank Tracy Roe for her scrupulous and eagle-eyed copyediting.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

And sometime in the next ten years we are going to launch our first asteroid mining mission. No doubt about it, we are a species built for bold. But without bold leadership to help us set the course, our history also tells us that we can wander in the desert of bad decisions for a mighty long time. “The adjacent possible” is theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman’s wonderful term for all the myriad paths unlocked by every novel discovery, the multitude of universes hidden inside something as simple as an idea. 27 Abundance is one of those simple ideas. Its time has come. It is up to the bold to unlock this adjacent possible, to help humanity live up to our full exponential potential.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Evolutionary dynamics has no need of abstract and vast spaces like all the possible viable animals, DNA sequences, sets of proteins, or biological laws. Exaptations are too unpredictable and too dependent on the whole suite of living creatures to be analyzed and coded into properties of DNA sequences. Better, as the theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman proposes, to think of evolutionary dynamics as the exploration, in time, by the biosphere, of the adjacent possible. The same goes for the evolution of technologies, economies, and societies. The poverty of the conception that economic markets tend to unique equilibria, independent of their histories, shows the danger of thinking outside of time.

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eddington experiment, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Mahatma Gandhi, music of the spheres, Necker cube, p-value, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, world market for maybe five computers, Zipf's Law

The extreme Gouldian view—certainly the view inspired by his rhetoric, though it is hard to tell from his own words whether he literally holds it himself—is radically different from and utterly incompatible with the standard neo-Darwinian model. It also, as I shall show, has implications which, once they are spelled out, anybody can see are absurd. It is very clearly expressed—betrayed might be a better word—in asides in Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe (1995): One might imagine that the first multicellular creatures would all be very similar, only later diversifying, from the bottom up, into different genera, families, orders, classes, and so on. That, indeed, would be the expectation of the strictest conventional Darwinist Darwin, profoundly influenced by the emerging view of geologic gradualism, proposed that all evolution occurred by the very gradual accumulation of useful variations.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

This path dependence is obvious in some ways. There’s not much point in mining uranium till you have invented steel, cement, electricity and computing, and understood nuclear physics. Technology proceeds, like evolution, to the ‘adjacent possible’, a phrase coined by the evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman. It does not leap far into the future. I recently tried to think of examples of inventions that came long after their time, that should have been invented much sooner than they were – things we take for granted now and that would have been great for our grandparents to have had. It’s surprisingly hard to come up with them.

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts

AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business process, corporate governance, Drosophila, Erdős number, experimental subject, fixed income, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, independent contractor, industrial cluster, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Milgram experiment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, power law, public intellectual, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social distancing, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Y2K

When it came to mathematics, however, he was an absolute juggernaut, publishing nearly fifteen hundred papers in his lifetime (and even a few after), more than any mathematician in history, bar possibly the great Euler. He also invented, with his collaborator Alfred Rényi, the formal theory of random graphs. A random graph is, as the name might suggest, a network of nodes connected by links in a purely random fashion. To use an analogy of the biologist Stuart Kauffman, imagine throwing a boxload of buttons onto the floor, then choosing pairs of buttons at random and tying them together with appropriate-length threads of string (Figure 2.1). If we have a very large floor, a very large box of buttons, and plenty of spare time, what would such networks end up looking like?

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

One day his clone will return here to do exactly the same thing, the circle repeating forevermore. Autopoiesis looks like Borges’s circle of wizards being born and dying in the temple. But how was the first wizard made? Another student of the legendary Walter McCulloch claims to have an answer to that question. Stuart Kauffman, currently at the University of Vermont, studied a class of chemical reactions in which the product of reaction is the catalyst of the reaction. These so-called ‘autocatalytic’ reactions may explain the origins of life – or how the first autopoietic wizard in Borges’s story came about.19 Experiments have shown20 how, through autocatalysis, chemical ingredients can exhibit a rudimentary form of natural selection.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

It was, and will be, one of the most important scientific discoveries of the century. 11Some of the early trailblazers who combined the study of complexity theory with economics include, Kenneth Arrow (economist), Philip Anderson (physicist), Larry Summers (economist), John Holland (physicist), Tom Sargent (economist), Stuart Kauffman (physicist), David Pines (physicist), José Scheinkman (economist), William Brock (economist) and of course, W. B. Arthur (economist), who coined the term complexity economics and has been largely responsible for its initial growth and exposure to mainstream academia. 12Knightian uncertainty is an economic term that refers to risk.

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike by Eugene W. Holland

business cycle, capital controls, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, commons-based peer production, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, deskilling, Eben Moglen, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lewis Mumford, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-Fordism, price mechanism, Richard Stallman, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, slashdot, Stuart Kauffman, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wage slave, working poor, Yochai Benkler

And the results of experimentation with planned economies of the kind suggested by major Marxism are by now fairly conclusive—planned economies are inferior to market econo­ mies according to the criterion that matters most for schizoanalytic nom­ adology: the overall development of productive forces.27 In circumstances that have necessarily changed, the Problem now is not how to subordinate social production to the conscious mastery of communal control but how to free from capitalist command the potential of markets to self-organize social production immanently.28 Although theories of free-market self-organization have a centurieslong history (dating at least as far back as the sixteenth century) and have recently been recast in complexity theory terms by the likes of Stuart Kauffman, Friedrich von Hayek is, for our purposes, the most important proponent of what he calls decentralized or market planning. To be sure, invoking the economic theories of von Hayek is almost as problematic as invoking the political theory of Carl Schmitt: although not himself a Nazi, von Hayek was a severe critic of socialism and (for slightly different rea­ sons) an obdurate foe of organized labor; what’s more, ideas of his were championed by the likes of Margaret Thatcher, among others.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

In its place is a drift to the middle. Eccentrics and outliers are ever less welcome. As physicist Lee Smolin puts it: ‘It is a cliché to ask whether a young Einstein would now be hired by a university. The answer is obviously no.’ 62 What about a young Marie Curie? Or more recent mavericks like Stuart Kauffman, Lynn Margulis or David Deutsch (the pioneer of quantum computing who recently admitted his work would never have been funded today)?63 Would a thinker like Derek Parfit, who published two of the most important books of ethical philosophy of modern times and little else, find a foothold in a system that relentlessly prioritises quantity?

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? (New York: Mariner Books, 2008). 18. John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 19. Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 20. Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 21. I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe (New York: Delta Books, 1966). CHAPTER 10. FOR THE CHALLENGE 1. Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie, African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). 2.

The Science of Language by Noam Chomsky

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, backpropagation, British Empire, Brownian motion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, Drosophila, epigenetics, finite state, Great Leap Forward, Howard Zinn, language acquisition, phenotype, public intellectual, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, trolley problem

There is a considerable increase in degree of simplification. And there also seems to be some progress toward biology – not necessarily biology as typically understood by philosophers and by many others, as a selectional evolutionary story about the gradual introduction of a complex structure, but biology as understood by people like Stuart Kauffman (1993) and D'Arcy Thompson (1917/1942/1992). I wonder if you would comment on the extent to which that kind of mathematical approach has progressed.[C] NC: Ever since this business began in the early fifties – two or three students, Eric Lenneberg, me, Morris Halle, apparently nobody else – the topic we were interested in was, how could you work this into biology?

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Boeing 747, book value, Boris Johnson, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, Necker cube, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method, twin studies, value engineering

Creationists presumably believe the Turbellaria have lived on Earth for the same length of time as all other animals, give or take a day or two during October 4004 BC. So if a massive class of animals failed to leave a single fossil, surely the vertebrates can be forgiven for a few ‘gaps’ in their fossil record. *4 This was exactly the misapprehension formed by the distinguished (and far from stupid) theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman, who imagined that ‘species which founded taxa appear to have built up the higher taxa from the top down. That is, exemplars of major phyla were present first, followed by progressive filling in at class, order, and lower taxonomic levels.’ This profound misunderstanding was nurtured by the excesses of ‘poetic science’ beloved of Stephen Jay Gould – specifically, Gould’s book Wonderful Life – against which I warned in the Afterword to the essay on ‘Universal Darwinism’ in section II of this collection

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

If topography is constantly changing, like the business and economic landscape, the informational task is impossible. Simon asserts that we do not maximize, we satisfy-we follow rules and procedures, like the organization of supermarket queues, that produce results that are good enough. Simon's example parallels complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman's description of what he calls fitness landscapes. 26 Kauffman is interested in the general mathematical structure of complex systems. Height above sea level in Simon's example might equally be a measure of how well a species is adapted to its environment, or how effectively scarce resources are allocated between competing ends.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett

Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Build a better mousetrap, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, deep learning, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fermat's Last Theorem, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, information retrieval, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, language acquisition, megaproject, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Of course if there really is nothing new under the sun, this is no limitation, but human imagination, the capacity we have to envision realities that are not accessible to us by simple hill climbing from where we currently are, does seem to be a major game-changer, permitting us to create, by foresighted design, opportunities and, ultimately, enterprises and artifacts that could not otherwise arise. A conscious human mind is not a miracle, not a violation of the principles of natural selection, but a novel extension of them, a new crane that adjusts evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman’s concept of the adjacent possible: many more places in Design Space are adjacent to us because we have evolved the ability to think about them and either seek them or shun them. The unanswered question for Domingos and other exponents of deep learning is whether learning a sufficiently detailed and dynamic theory of agents with imagination and reason-giving capabilities would enable a system (a computer program, a Master Algorithm) to generate and exploit the abilities of such agents, that is to say, to generate all the morally relevant powers of a person.103 My view is (still) that deep learning will not give us—in the next fifty years—anything like the “superhuman intelligence” that has attracted so much alarmed attention recently (Bostrom 2014; earlier invocations are Moravec 1988; Kurzweil 2005; and Chalmers 2010; see also the annual Edge world question 2015; and Katchadourian 2015).

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

See Richard Young, "Evolution of the Human Hand: The Role of Throwing and Clubbing," Journal of Anatomy 202 (2003): 165–74; Frank Wilson, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1998). 9. The Santa Fe Institute has played a pioneering role in developing concepts and technology related to complexity and emergent systems. One of the principal developers of paradigms associated with chaos and complexity is Stuart Kauffman. Kauffman's At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) looks "at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos." In his book Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), John Tyler Bonner asks the questions "How is it that an egg turns into an elaborate adult?

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, classic study, complexity theory, delayed gratification, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, invention of writing, lateral thinking, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the High Line, the long tail, urban sprawl

And yet in my opening lines I confessed to an ear for a rhyme that would lead me into cautious flirtation with recurring patterns, with lawfulness and forward directionality in evolution. So although my return as host will not be a retracing of steps, I shall be publicly wondering whether something a little bit like a retracing might not be appropriate. Rerunning Evolution The American theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman put the question well in a 1985 article: One way to underline our current ignorance is to ask, if evolution were to recur from the Precambrian when early eukaryotic cells had already been formed, what organisms in one or two billion years might be like. And, if the experiment were repeated myriads of times, what properties of organisms would arise repeatedly, what properties would be rare, which properties were easy for evolution to happen upon, which were hard?

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

The theory looks for mathematical principles of order underlying many complex systems: galaxies, crystals, weather systems, cells, organisms, brains, ecosystems, societies, and so on. Dozens of new books have applied these ideas to topics such as AIDS, urban decay, the Bosnian war, and, of course, the stock market. Stuart Kauffman, one of the movement’s leaders, suggested that feats like self-organization, order, stability, and coherence may be an “innate property of some complex systems.” Evolution, he suggests, may be a “marriage of selection and self-organization.” Complexity theory raises interesting issues. Natural selection presupposes that a replicator arose somehow, and complexity theory might help explain the “somehow.”