ROSE GROSSHANS

• In The Birth of the Pill, Jonathan Eig credits philanthropist and feminist Katharine McCormick — advised by Margaret Sanger — with being the sole funder of crucial early-stage research leading to the development of the combined oral contraceptive pill, now one of the most common and convenient birth control methods.

• The Rockefeller Foundation invested in research on improving agricultural productivity in the developing world, which is now commonly believed to have been the catalyst for a “Green Revolution” that Wikipedia states is “credited with saving over a billion people from starvation.” (The Wikipedia article discusses the role of the Rockefeller

If you believe Stephen Wolfram, the entire universe is basically just a big state machine, ticking away.

Either you say everything is overdetermined, or you say that only the microscale is really doing anything (the classic reductionist option).

You can describe a computer down at the microscale of its physical logic gates, in the middle mesoscale of its machine code, or up at the macroscale of its operating system. You can describe the brain as a massive set of molecular machinery ticking away, but also as a bunch of neurons and their input-output signals, or even as the dynamics of a