Sublime

Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life, by Jeremy Campbell.

His method was rooted in experiment, curiosity, and the ability to marvel at phenomena that the rest of us rarely pause to ponder after we’ve outgrown our wonder years.

The idea of living creatures being numbered like software, being subject to updates and revisions, troubled Grant. He could not exactly say why—it was too new a thought—but he was instinctively uneasy about it. They were, after all, living creatures.…

the more we learn about a system, the more sophisticated and elegant we discover it to be.

but now we tend to think more in terms of fertile circumstances, wherein uncountable numbers of minds contribute to a river of innovation.

he first figuratively and then literally set out to “play God,” initially by making the claim that humans had the power of gods and then during the past decade by creating an organization to save and restore endangered species with modern biotechnology.

That assumption springs from a belief in evolution as a random process that has produced sub-optimal human brains,

Epigenetic regulators, such as culture, evolve to serve the genome.

The argument of this book is that a series of shared properties and patterns recur again and again in unusually fertile environments.