One office featured a name that Arthur was very interested to see: Stuart Kauffman of the University of Pennsylvania. Arthur had briefly met Kauffman two years earlier at a conference in Brussels, where he had been immensely impressed by Kauffman’s talk on cells in a developing embryo. The idea was that the cells send out chemical messengers to trigger the development of other cells in the embryo in a self-consistent network, thus producing a coherent organism instead of just a lump of protoplasm. It was a concept that resonated strongly with Arthur’s ideas on the self-consistent, mutually
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