Sublime

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

The biosphere is utterly saturated with design, with purpose, with reasons. What I call the “design stance” predicts and explains features throughout the living world using the same assumptions that work so well when reverse-engineering artifacts made by (somewhat) intelligent human designers.

Before we can have competent reproducers, we have to have competent persisters, structures with enough stability to hang around long enough to pick up revisions.

Curiosity is a process.

we recognize design in the purposeful arrangement of parts.

In the first, lowest level we find Darwinian creatures, with their competences pre-designed and fixed, created by the R&D of evolution by natural selection. They are born “knowing” all they will ever “know”; they are gifted but not learners.

It so happened that the hardware specifications that would make creativity practicable were included in those that were being heavily favoured for pre-creative meme replication.

‘more is different’ (also discussed in Waldrop’s classic,