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

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.

The measure of performance of any given agent is the amount of money it accumulates through its actions.

nonlinear interactions almost always make the behavior of the aggregate more complicated than would be predicted by summing or averaging.

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.

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

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