Sublime

Darwin resolved a problem that was not a problem at all in nineteenth-century biology, because his contemporaries were convinced that they already knew the answer.

Nature’s laws do not change very much. So long as the store of human knowledge continues to expand, as it has since Gutenberg’s printing press, we will slowly come to a better understanding of nature’s signals, if never all its secrets. And yet if science and technology are the heroes of this book, there is the risk in the age of Big Data about bec

Evolution by natural selection is not itself a designed thing, an agent with purposes, but it acts as if it were (it occupies the role vacated by the Intelligent Designer): it is a set of processes that “find” and “track” reasons for things to be arranged one way rather than another. The chief difference between the reasons found by evolution and t

Gratuitous affirmations of a dominant theory can mesmerize the unwary. They lull people into assuming that objectively difficult problems don’t really matter. That they’ve been solved already. Or will be solved soon. Or are unimportant. Or something. They actively distract readers from noticing an idea’s shortcomings.

Euclid’s argument ran like this: Assume there is a largest prime number, p. You can then create a larger number by multiplying together every prime number up to and including p, and adding 1. But that number, when divided by any of those primes, will leave a remainder of 1—so it, too, is prime (or, possibly is divisible by a prime larger than p, li

Perhaps the greatest “phase transition” in our thinking that such an approach could engender is the maturation in our willingness to live with relatively high levels of uncertainty in the domains of complex phenomena—and thus give up on ideas like complete “cures,” the elimination of “risk,” the design of perfect “stability,” and achieving total “s

The smartest minds today—including those studying computers, biology, math, physics—have come to understand that the world no longer adheres to predictable, linear mandates. Instead, life is filled with chaos and complexity, periods of order and disorder, linearity and nonlinearity. In place of steady lines, observers now see loops, spirals, wobble

some form of complexity theory is required if we are to understand many of the intimate, and patently uncertain, interactions found in modern society.