From the point of view of physics, it is a miracle that [seven million New Yorkers are fed each day] without any control mechanism other than sheer capitalism.

Particular individuals do not recur, but their building blocks do.

The recycling of resource by the aggregate behavior of a diverse array of agents is much more than the sum of the individual actions.

If we are to understand the interactions of a large number of agents, we must first be able to describe the capabilities of individual agents.

This use of building blocks to generate internal models is a pervasive feature of complex adaptive systems.

When a new building block is discovered, the result is usually a range of innovations.

Evolution continually innovates, but at each level it conserves the elements that are recombined to yield the innovations.