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.

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.

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

Unwrapping occurs when the "solution" is explicitly built into the program from the start.

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