Alexis Rondeau

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Reply · Sunday, August 23, 2026 · 14:08

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In reply to @juliangough · Mar 18, 2026

(Rest of the references. The Kevin Kelly book mentioned immediately below, by the way, is a particularly good read.)

Kelly, Kevin. (1994). Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World Reading, Massachusetts: Basic Books.

Kirshenbaum, Arik. (2020). The zoologist's guide to the galaxy: What animals on Earth reveal about aliens—and ourselves. Penguin Press.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste. (1809). Philosophie zoologique. Dentu.

Levin, Michael. (2019). “The computational boundary of a 'self': developmental bioelectricity drives multicellularity and scale-free cognition.” Frontiers in Psychology 10, Article 2688. t.co/k3x2cQXiJe

Mayr, Ernst. (1942). Systematics and the origin of species from the viewpoint of a zoologist. Columbia University Press.

Miller, James G. (1978). Living Systems. McGraw-Hill.

Miller, James G., and Jessie L. Miller. (1995). “Applications of living systems theory.” Systems Practice 8, 19–45 (1995). t.co/JNOtkDjqEF

Misner, Charles W., Kip S. Thorne, and John Archibald Wheeler. (1973). Gravitation. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.

McGhee, George R., Jr. (2011). Convergent evolution: Limited forms most beautiful. MIT Press. t.co/InJawp7IK4

———. (2019). Convergent evolution on Earth: Lessons for the search for extraterrestrial life. MIT Press. t.co/0LrvcggWuu

Noble, Denis. (2011). “A theory of biological relativity: No privileged level of causation.” Interface Focus, 2(1), 55–64. t.co/2zV69oS4C4

Odling-Smee, F. Jon t.co/oU6GZKnGNW. (2013). “Niche construction theory: A viable evolutionary synthesis”. Evolutionary Ecology, 27(4), 715–736. t.co/MQTvBrg48e

Parr, Thomas t.co/oU6GZKnGNW. (2022). Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior. MIT Press.

Penrose, Roger. (2011). Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe. Knopf.

Price, Michael E. (2017). “Entropy and selection: Life as an adaptation for universe replication.” Complexity, Vol. 2017, Article ID 4745379, 4 pages. t.co/Y1Jsyf4gUo

Prigogine, Ilya. (1978). “Time, structure and fluctuations”. Science, 201(4358), 777–785. t.co/uIdcX9XItq

———. (2017). Non-Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics. Courier Dover Publications.

Rosen, Robert. (2005). Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry Into The Nature, Origin, And Fabrication Of Life. New Ed. Columbia University Press.

Rovelli, Carlo. (2022). Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution. Riverhead Books.

Sagan, Carl (1973). The cosmic connection: An extraterrestrial perspective. Doubleday.

Shainline, Jeffrey M. (2020). “Does Cosmological Evolution Select for Technology?” New Journal of Physics 22 (7). IOP Publishing: 073064. doi:10.1088/1367-2630/ab9d9d. t.co/X991D6wW6F.

Shapiro, James A. (2013). “How life changes itself: The read-write (RW) genome.” Physics of Life Reviews, 10(3), 287–323. t.co/0YkPKgaKPG

Smart, John M. (2000, May 20). “Intro to the developmental singularity hypothesis: A speculative evolutionary developmental (evo devo) model for hierarchical complexity emergence under continously accelerating change.” t.co/LDE7mRaPF2. t.co/XTFcgBeMn6

———. (2003, Sept 12-14). Exploring the technological singularity: Seeking the universal drivers of accelerating change [Informally published book]. Accelerating Change conference, Stanford, CA, United States. PDF: t.co/xlodEhI57s

———. (2005, May 26). “Answering the Fermi paradox: Exploring the mechanisms of universal transcension.” Acceleration Studies Foundation. t.co/4PNPhIyLSi

———. (2009). “Evo devo universe? A framework for speculations on cosmic culture.” In Cosmos and Culture: Cultural evolution in a cosmic context, edited by Steven J. Dick and Mark L. Lupisella, 201–95. Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, NASA SP-2009-4802. t.co/43sUqz6SxI.

———. (2012). “The transcension hypothesis: Sufficiently advanced civilizations invariably leave our universe, and implications for METI and SETI.” Acta Astronautica 78 (September): 55–68. doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2011.11.006. t.co/x2XFjswq06.

———. (2019). “Evolutionary development: A universal perspective.” In G. Y. Georgiev, J. M. Smart, C. L. Flores Martinez, & M. E. Price (Eds.), Evolution, development and complexity: Multiscale evolutionary models of complex adaptive systems (pp. 23–92). Springer International Publishing. t.co/eM7DRSpdQy

Smith, Quentin. (1990). “A Natural Explanation of the Existence and Laws of Our Universe.” Australian Journal of Psychology 68 (1): 22–43. t.co/0eIbxw0V3y.

Smolin, Lee (1992). “Did the Universe Evolve?” Classical and Quantum Gravity 9 (1): 173–91.

———. (1997). The Life of the Cosmos. Oxford University Press, USA.

Spencer, Herbert. (1857). “Progress: Its law and cause.” The Westminster Review, 67(132), 445–485.

———. (1890). Illustrations of universal progress: A series of discussions. D. Appleton and Company. t.co/WRLF0NCSbb

Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1959). The phenomenon of man. Harper & Brothers.

Thorne, Kip S. (1994). Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. WW Norton & Company.

Vaas, Rüdiger. (2009). “Life, the Universe, and Almost Everything: Signs of Cosmic Design?” arXiv Preprint arXiv:0910.5579. t.co/PWi4MZbRyh.

Vidal, Clément. (2010). “Computational and Biological Analogies for Understanding Fine-Tuned Parameters in Physics.” Foundations of Science 15 (4): 375–93. doi:10.1007/s10699-010-9183-x. t.co/lErNhEQgDZ.

———. (2014). The Beginning and the End - The Meaning of Life in a Cosmological Perspective. Frontiers Collection. Springer. t.co/yDFu0jUXzT.

———. (2016). “Stellivore extraterrestrials? Binary stars as living systems, Acta Astronautica 128:251-256, ISSN 0094-5765, t.co/TzlMu2cKMi.

Wagner, Andreas. (2014). Arrival of the fittest: How Nature Innovates. Current.

Wagner, Gunther. P. (2000). What is the promise of "devo-evo"? The Journal of Experimental Zoology, 288(2), 95–98. t.co/hxjCtLwZ2w<95::AID-JEZ1>t.co/y9eCcPJkLu;2-9

———. (Ed.). (2001). The character concept in evolutionary biology. Academic Press.

———. (2014). Homology, genes, and evolutionary innovation. Princeton University Press.

West, Geoffrey. (2017). Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. New York: Penguin Press.

Wilson, David S. (2019). This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution. New York: Pantheon.

@juliangough Duuude! That's a fantastic list of books.

Love that Andreas Wagner's "Arrival of the fittest" made it on there. I re-read it every few years just to make sure I reset some of my core assumptions about how quickly life can simply, just like, start.