Sublime

Gray, with whom he had broken completely, became convinced that the illustrious Agassiz mind was in a state of rapid deterioration. “This man,” wrote Gray, “who might have been so useful to science and promised so much here has been for years a delusion, a snare, and a…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

It doesn’t seem particularly compelling. One source of evidence is work by Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a neuroscientist who has dissolved the brains of many creatures to determine how many neurons are present. She’s found a lot of interesting scaling laws. She has a paper discussing the human brain as a scaled-up primate brain.60 Across a wide variety

We know that life’s remarkable robustness, in large part, is dependent on variation; systems that suppress or lose their diversity are prone to collapse.

But even gossip has its limits. Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings. Even today, a critical threshold in human organisations falls somewhere around this magic number.

There are, however, on this planet phenomena that are hidden in plain sight. These are the phenomena that we study as complex systems: the convoluted exhibitions of the adaptive world—from cells to societies.

Gruber, Howard E. “Networks of Enterprise in Creative Scientific Work.” In Psychology of Science: Contributions to Metascience, edited by Barry Gholson et al., 246. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ―――. “The Evolving Systems Approach to Creative Work.” Creativity Research Journal 1, no. 1 (1988): 27–51.

The individual is a cell in the social superorganism. When he feels he is no longer necessary to the larger group, he, too, begins to wither away.

Even though it is encouraging to have shown that relatively simple rules can give such phenomena, it in no way explains how a Complex System comprising many interacting parts, manages to produce such phenomena.