Recently I have been reading A new kind of Science before falling asleep. Besides being just plain beautiful, its main message so far has been: Complexity rises out of simple conditions
I’m not yet fit enough with the concepts to generalize and apply the book to other areas, but then again I have barely read 10%

2024-05-07: Wolfram continues to work in this area, and this recent post using automata as a model for evolution is a masterpiece.

The intuition of physics tends to be that there are ultimately simple models for things, whereas in biology there’s a certain sense that everything is always almost infinitely complicated, with a new effect to consider at every turn. But presumably that’s in large part because what we study in biology tends to quickly come face to face with computational irreducibility—whereas in physics we’ve been able to find things to study that avoid this. But now the commonality in foundations between physics and biology suggests that there should also be in biology the kind of structure we have in physics—complete with general laws that allow us to make useful, broad statements. And perhaps the simple model I’ve presented here can help lead us there—and in the end help build up a new paradigm for thinking about biology in a fundamentally theoretical way.

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