Sublime

Darwin’s greatest single influence was Adam Smith. Smith believes in the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. He says it

Hence, if man goes on selecting, and thus augmenting, any peculiarity, he will almost certainly unconsciously modify other parts of the structure, owing to the mysterious laws of the correlation of growth.

In an 1844 letter to his friend J.D. Hooker, Charles Darwin makes it clear that his great insight emerged from the methodical accumulation of facts:

Looking back, I infer that there must have been something in me a little superior to the common run of youths, otherwise the above-mentioned men, so much older than me and higher in academical position, would never have allowed me to associate with them. Certainly I was not aware of any such superiority, and I remember one of my sporting friends, T

infiniment plus grande que nécessaire. À la fin du XIXe siècle, le brillant biologiste Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), fervent défenseur de Darwin et grand-père d’Aldous Huxley, déclara même devant le Parlement britannique qu’il serait impossible à l’humanité d’épuiser les ressources des océans. Leur pouvoir de régénération était simplement trop puissan

evolution does not ‘care’ about that. It favours only the genes that spread best through the population.

As a physicist thinking about aging and death it was natural not only to ask about possible mechanisms for why we age and why we die but, equally important, to ask where the scale of human life span comes from. Why hasn’t anybody lived for more than 123 years?

In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), I argued that natural selection is an algorithmic process, a collection of sorting algorithms that are themselves composed of generate-and-test algorithms that exploit randomness (pseudo-randomness, chaos) in the generation phase, and some sort of mindless quality-control testing phase, with the winners advancing