Sublime

The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex

abiogenesis is reconceptualized as a thermodynamic event that opened up new energy flow channels on Earth to facilitate entropy production. And as these channels emerged and expanded to relieve thermodynamic pressure, the increased energy flow stimulated further chemical and biological self-organization, eventually giving rise to the interconnected

There is an additional element of importance: these systems usually generate implicit internal models of their environments, models progressively revised and improved as the system accumulates experience. The systems learn.

regard the capacity for Darwinian evolution as the key distinguishing feature of life, subsuming self-replication and self-maintenance. Living systems record their adaptive history as genetic information, something that is not the case for non-living systems.

It traditionally assumed that firms were independent, and so changes would be independent, and so their sizes and aggregate effects would be distributed normally.

For highly adapted replicators (which are the only ones worth calling replicators) we need consider only fairly small variations, because under most large variations they would no longer be replicators.

The other alternative leads to the establishment of a novel structure in which each component maintains its boundary and its individuality, but the two (or more) units also constitute a novel, higher level of organization

If you assume equilibrium, which economists do, then by definition cascades of collapse cannot happen.

explains how a complex universe that is finely tuned for life emerges from a reality that starts off simple: a lifeless universe that produces a black hole.