You have to talk about systems that remain continuously dynamic, and that are embedded in environments that themselves are continuously dynamic.” Stability, as John Holland says, is death; somehow, the world has to adapt itself to a condition of perpetual novelty, at the edge of chaos. “I still haven’t found the right words for that,” says Cowan. “Just recently I was toying with the title of Havelock Ellis’s book, The Dance of Life. But that isn’t quite right. It isn’t a dance. There’s not even a given tempo. So if anything we’re getting back to Heraclitus: ‘Everything Moves.’
