Sublime

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature that interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

The quintessential example of such a complex adaptive system is, of course, life itself in all of its extraordinary manifestations from cells to cities. The Darwinian theory of natural selection is the scientific narrative that has been developed for understanding and describing how organisms and ecosystems continuously evolve and adapt to changing

cities as complex adaptive systems exhibit to various degrees the following properties: heterogeneity, interconnectivity, scaling, circular causality, and evolution.

The battle to combat entropy by continually having to supply more energy for growth, innovation, maintenance, and repair, which becomes increasingly more challenging as the system ages, underlies any serious discussion of aging, mortality, resilience, and sustainability, whether for organisms, companies, or societies.

This reveals the ultimate function of cities: cities are social reactors, places where interactions among many different strangers can be realized and sustained. Ultimately, it is this accelerating dynamic that creates the buzz of a great city.

Although ants form a caste-based society and have a queen for producing offspring, there is no central authority or leader in an ant colony. The highly intelligent and sophisticated behavior exhibited by a multimillion-member colony is an emergent property from the interaction of the individuals in a social network. Nature demonstrates that

Instead of assuming agents were perfectly rational, we allowed there were limits to how smart they were. Instead of assuming the economy displayed diminishing returns (negative feedbacks), we allowed that it might also contain increasing returns (positive feedbacks). Instead of assuming the economy was a mechanistic system operating at equilibrium,

This invariance of terminal units can be understood in the context of the parsimonious nature of natural selection. Capillaries, mitochondria, cells, et cetera, act as “ready-made” basic building blocks of the corresponding networks for new species, which are rescaled accordingly.