"...from schools to universities to research institutes, we teach about origins in disconnected fragments. We seem incapable of offering a unified account of how things came to be the way they are."
"I, and all the complex things around me, exist only because many things were assembled in a very precise way. The 'emergent' properties are not magical. They are really there and eventually they may start re-arranging the environments that generated them. But they don't exist 'in' the bits and pieces that made them; they emerge from the arrangement of those bits and pieces in very precise ways. And that is also true of the emergent entities known as "you" and "me"."
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Source: David Christian (2011). “Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History”, p.2, Univ of California Press
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"Maps of Time attempts to assemble a coherent and accessible account of origins, a modern creation myth."