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• On the other hand, Bak knew something else: that the stately regularity of the power law is not to be ignored. He knew that just about the only way to generate a power law pattern is by some process that is steeped in history—that is, in which the future emerges out of a string of accidents, each leaving its indelible trace on the course of events.
• Stuart Kauffman is a physician by training, thinks more like a physicist, and works almost exclusively on problems in biology—not small problems, such as pinning down the structure of one more protein or the sequence of one more gene, but large problems. In the mid-1980s, while at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Kauffman proposed a ...
• have seen so far suggests that details often have little effect anyway. In 1993, as if to prove this point, Per Bak and Kim Sneppen, both working then at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, found an even simpler game for coevolution that leads to almost exactly the same results. It is worth looking at their game in a little detail, for it is pr...
• So the Bak-Sneppen ecosystem evolves into a state in which all the species face fairly large barriers to further evolution. At the same time, even a single evolutionary step made by one species can destabilize the situations of other species, and can trigger rapid chain reactions of evolution that sweep through most of the ecosystem before things a...
• This sudden change in the state of helium is an example of what physicists refer to as a phase transition.