Sublime

“Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities,” by Bettencourt, et al. A thoughtful layperson’s introduction to Kleiber’s law and its application to urban culture can be found in George Johnson’s “Of Mice and Elephants: A Matter of Scale.”

Natural selection isn’t about groups, or species, or even individuals. In a sexual species, an individual organism doesn’t evolve; it keeps whatever genes it’s born with. An individual is a once-off collection of genes that will never reappear; how can you select on that? When you consider that nearly all of your ancestors are dead, it’s clear that

Paul Romer, an economist at New York University who specializes in the theory of economic growth, says real sustainable economic growth does not stem from new resources but from existing resources that are rearranged to make them more valuable. Growth comes from remixing. Brian Arthur, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute who specializes in the d

Lawrence Hargreaves, an early Australian aviation experimenter, wrote in 1893 that his fellow enthusiasts must root out the idea that by ‘keeping the results of their labours to themselves, a fortune will be assured them’.

variation and selection with a mechanism for rewarding success and weeding out failure, or eradicating it as quickly as possible, is a far better mechanism for the advancement and development of technologies than deliberate directed investment, based on certain possibly wrongheaded preconceptions.

From the dawn of life to the present, beneficial degradation has been a constant background—there’s no way to avoid

These are all highly contestable statements.

no more need to have them enforce our contracts.