As they walked along the roads and hillsides around the convent, Arthur couldn't help but be intrigued by Kauffman's concept of order and self-organization. The irony of it was that when Kauffman used the word "order," he was obviously referring to the same thing that Arthur meant by the word "messiness"—namely emergence, the incessant urge of complex systems to organize themselves into patterns. But then, maybe it wasn't so surprising that Kauffman was using exactly the opposite word; he was coming at the concept from exactly the opposite direction. Arthur talked about "messiness" because he
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