Understanding Living Systems

Perhaps the greatest “phase transition” in our thinking that such an approach could engender is the maturation in our willingness to live with relatively high levels of uncertainty in the domains of complex phenomena—and thus give up on ideas like complete “cures,” the elimination of “risk,” the design of perfect “stability,” and achieving total “s

basic ingredients for systems that could devise and improvise solutions to living that are emergent, versatile, adaptive, and robust. The new picture dispels the long-standing idea that living systems must be regarded as machines.