A reader draws my attention to this rather good systems-theoretic piece by Matt Ridley in the London Spectator.
Charles Darwin, who was born 200 years ago next month, has spent the 150 years since he published The Origin of Species [sic] fighting for the idea of common descent. Though physically dead, he is still doing battle for the notion that chimps are your cousins and cauliflowers your kin. It is a sufficiently weird concept to keep Darwin relevant, revered and resented in equal measure. But in some ways it is less radical and topical than his other, more philosophical legacy: that order can generate itself, that the living world is a “bottom-up” place. On the internet, Darwinian unordained order is now ubiquitous as never before.
Living beings are eddies in the stream of entropy …