Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

We talk a lot about complex systems here at Mindscape.

And one of the interesting things to me about complex systems is there's a little bit of a tension between the fact that on the one hand, the space of possibilities is mind-bogglingly large, right?

When you have a bunch of small constituents that can come together in different combinations,

different patterns to make some kind of aggregate, which is a very typical thing that happens

to get complexity.

Generally, just the numerology works out that the number of possible aggregations

or ways to aggregate things is ginormous. You cannot even possibly imagine searching through

all the possibilities. And yet, the tension is with the fact that in some environment, if we're

talking about a complex system that persists and adapts and flourishes and whatever,

that is somehow fitting into the environment where it exists, there's kind of natural features

that we see happening over and over again. Power law distributions are just one famous example of this.

But in specific complex systems like biology, in evolution, we see what is called convergence,

right?

You have different developments of sight, vision, and the eyeballs in different kinds of organisms

may have developed in completely different ways, but end up looking very much the same.

If we just thought about all the different ways you could arrange the molecules in the eyeballs, they would be just, again, unimaginably large, but there's the right way to do it to actually achieve the purpose that you're trying

to achieve.

So both of these facts, the fact that the space of possibilities is ginormous and the fact

that there is nevertheless sometimes convergence onto the best way to achieve some purpose

or some goal or some adaptation, if you wanted to call it that,

...