Sublime

James Coleman,

not vary.

These are worlds that will be revealed not by better instruments but by new models and frameworks that allow us to see the familiar world in unfamiliar ways—to transform domains described into domains rigorously quantified and observations informally sensed into those formally understood.

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.

In the century and a half since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, we still are stymied by the complexity of the biosphere, and, just as with our financial systems, our efforts to intervene have often led to confounding results.

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

While scientific progress, then, proceeds by curiously exploring adjacent possibilities, preference is given to work closely tied to existing science and conducted by a privileged subset of scientists.

These data make a strong case that, as human social networks grow, they necessarily lead to systems that require fewer resources per person, and produce more per person. In other words, the benefits of scale for human groups have always been there.

The science of complex systems is the study of how local interactions can lead to global consequences.