Physicist and Astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker wrote on X in mid 2024:
Life occurs as a continual recursive combinatorial collapse of the space of possibilities … the structures it generates are increasingly deep recursive stacks, retaining the past in the present and using this to construct the future
https://x.com/sara_imari/status/1789423907050528990?s=46&t=LeiEF5SQYzBIfYYx7cSKUw
Nudel’s summer reading list included her book on Assembly Theory, Life As No One Know it
Recursive structures are an intuitive part of the designer’s toolkit as they provide a shorter path to complexity: building components from previously constructed sub-components, embedding history into objects.
One of Nudel’s favourite smart phone Apps is a simple but clever graphic tool called Isometric. It allows for the creation of “3D” structures using only parallelograms of different colours and orientations.
Playing with this tool, users soon work out that, rather than building designs from single parallelogram placement, it is more effective to build a library of subcomponents. These then become the next generation of parts from which to build structures of greater (and recursive) complexity
According to Assembly Theory, this is precisely what biological systems have been doing for aeons