quotes eggplant favorited
Everything interacts with everything else in biology, but somehow it seems to make the system robust instead of fragile. It’s hard to imagine that anybody who is interested in complexity wouldn’t start looking at biology, because there isn’t anything else anywhere close to it. Classical mathematics sort of checks out when you get into nonlinear phenomena, or even just simple recursive functions. Some civilizations had bricks throughout their entire existence and never figured out the arch, because the arch is a nonlinear organization of bricks. To me that’s the most interesting thing: that in matters of complexity, architecture dominates material.