Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Prologue: The Dawn of Man? -- 1. Iteration and Sequence -- 2. The Crisis in Biology -- 3. The Origin of "Species" -- 4. Chaos and Dimensionality -- 5. Chaostability -- 6. The Geometry of Life -- 7. The Living Computer -- 8. Morphology and Evolution -- 9. Entropy, Information, and Randomness -- 10. The Effectiveness of Mathematics -- 11. Life and Conflict -- 12. The World as Iteration and Recursion -- Notes -- Index
Summary
An alternative view of evolving complexity. Bird argues that randomness means not disorder but infinite order and that complexity arises from the "playing out" of chaotic systems