“evolution” in its familiar Darwinian sense. That also seemed obsolete. Their newer idea—that evolutionary innovation might occur by means other than incremental mutation, and spread by means other than vertical inheritance—called the Darwinian model into question, they claimed. By this time, Woese had been reading some brilliantly unconventional scientific thinkers, such as the biologist Stuart Kauffman and the physicist Ilya Prigogine, associated with the swirl of ideas known as chaos and complexity theory, who proposed that certain “emergent properties,” unpredictable and wondrously
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