The two organisms effectively rely on each other’s waste products: the algae captures energy from the sun and outputs oxygen and sugars as waste, which the coral polyps use to power their own growth. At the same time, the corals expel carbon dioxide, nitrates, and phosphates as waste, each of which fuels the growth of zooxanthellae. As the

Scientists have long recognized the importance of the symbiotic relationship between the coral and a microscopic algae called zooxanthella.

Platforms recycle much more than just architecture.

They built the API first, and exposed all the data that was crucial to the service, and then they built Twitter.com on top of the API.

This is not just a case of cultural exaptation: people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else.

Often, new scientific fields form by propping themselves over multiple platforms. The field that ultimately explained Darwin’s Paradox—ecosystems ecology—stands on the shoulders of population genetics, systems theory, and biochemistry, among others.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection was a “dangerous” idea—in Daniel Dennett’s phrase—because it challenged Biblical and human-centric accounts of life’s history, but the true measure of its scientific power lies in how many new fields were stacked on top of it over the course of the twentieth century: the

Kuhn’s paradigms of research are the scientific world’s equivalent of a software platform: a set of rules and conventions that govern the definition of terms, the collection of data, and the boundaries of inquiry for a particular field. Kuhn’s argument has often been mistaken as a defense of a purely relativistic account of science, where empirical

But the spaces Lloyd and Unwin built turned out to have these unusual properties: they made people think differently, because they created an environment where different kinds of thoughts could productively collide and recombine.