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 This is an outdated perspective, based on outdated metaphors like Richard

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, i

Alexander is inspired by how design occurs in the natural world. "Things that are good have a certain kind of structure," he told me. "You can't get that structure except dynamically. Period. In nature you've got continuous very-small-feedback-loop adaptation going on, which is why things get to be harmonious. That's why they have the qualities tha

The gurus for this kind of niche-shift will be people who have studied the places we want to go. Systems ecologists like Howard T. Odum have studied the food chains in a prairie or estuary or bottomland and then drawn diagrams of energy flows and fluxes.

When nonhumans act in accord with a distant future, like hiding seeds to eat next season, it is primarily as a result of genetic programming.