Sublime

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.

we have of the belief in a spherical Earth.

Anaximander’s greatness lies in the fact that on the basis of so little, in order to better account for his observations, he redesigns the universe.

The value (“fitness”) of a given combination of building blocks often cannot be predicted by a summing up of values assigned to the component blocks. This nonlinearity (commonly called epistasis in genetics) leads to co-adapted sets of blocks (alleles) that serve to bias sampling and add additional layers to the hierarchy.

By the turn of the century, however, a number of biochemists disagreed with Miescher’s questioning of nuclein’s potential. They suggested that it was nuclein, not protein, that transmitted heredity.10 Nonetheless, that nascent idea was firmly stamped out, largely by the work of one man—Phoebus Levene, the esteemed head of the chemistry department

They stressed that this reaction of FeS with H2S has a reducing power to drive the primordial metabolism.

as cities grow and their networks evolve, the area or volume of the networks needed to keep them functionally connected tends to become smaller on a per capita basis. For example, in larger cities more people can share the same bus or segment of road or sewer pipe.