Biology not physics holds the key to reality

Summary

Biochemist and complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman and computer scientist Andrea Roli argue that science is at “a third major transition”. Newton taught us to fix the space of possibilities in advance; life won’t allow it, they say, because evolution keeps producing adaptations nobody could predict. Ecology “is not deterministic, and properly lies outside of the Newtonian Paradigm”.

Rationale

One of our key sources on complexity. We’d extend its argument to culture: like life, it isn’t “linear, reducible to parts, binary and predictable”.