Sublime

The neo-Darwinian perspective, which still dominates the popular understanding of biology, isolates individual organisms or genes from the context of the living matrix that sustains them. Scarcity, competition and individual success are seen as the main drivers of evolution. This is an outdated perspective, based on outdated metaphors like Richard

In this I am calling upon Aristotle, who described entelechy as a finality or cause that is possessed within and unto itself.154 Aristotle’s primary example of entelechy was that of the seed: a seed’s potential and eventual plantness is encoded within that very seed. The seed is both a cause and a final outcome, and its becoming a plant represents

we cannot assume that everything interesting is at the same scale as ourselves.

The new science of complexity echoes the wisdom long passed down in the poetic tradition. The way to build a poem or a lifelike and useful system is to fold meaning into the simplest elements and allow complexity to emerge from their natural self-generation. Deal with many simple elements instead of one complex system. Think locally, act locally,