But, he would emphasize, neither was Darwinian natural selection the whole story. Darwin didn't know about self-organization—matter's incessant attempts to organize itself into ever more complex structures, even in the face of the incessant forces of dissolution described by the second law of thermodynamics. Nor did Darwin know that the forces of order and self-organization apply to the creation of living systems just as surely as they do to the formation of snowflakes or the appearance of convection cells in a simmering pot of soup. So the story of life is, indeed, the story of accident and
...more