90. M. Boden, “Autopoiesis and Life,” Cognitive Science Questions 1 (2000): 115–43, available at http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/archive/fulltexts/2469.html. See Eric Smith, Harold J. Morowitz, and Shelley D. Copley, “Core Metabolism as a Self-Organizing System,” in Protocells: Bridging Nonliving and Living Matter, ed. Steen Rasmussen, Mark Bedau, Liaohai Chen, David Deamer, David Krakauer, Norman Packard, and Peter Stadler (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2009), 433–60; Mark Bedau, “Weak Emergence,” in “Mind, Causation, and World,” special issue of Philosophical Perspectives, ed. James E. Tomberlin, 11 (1997): 375–99. Thanks to James Griesemer for introducing this literature to me in his Philosophy of Science seminar on Emergence, UC Davis, Spring 2012.

91. Evelyn Fox Keller, “Organisms, Machines, and Thunderstorms: A History of Self-Organization, Part One,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38, no. 1 (2008): 47–48. Kant defines self-organization in Critique of Judgment (1790).

92. On prioritization of the central dogma by synthetic biologists, see Elfick and Endy, “Synthetic Biology,” 9–10.

93. Experience of and conversation held with a scientist by the author, Spring 2015, Davis, California.

94. Campos, “BioBrick Road.”

95. Patrik Schumacher, “Hegemonic Parametricism Delivers a Market-Based Urban Order,” in “Architectural Design Parametricism 2.0,” special issue of AD, ed. Schumacher, 86, no. 2 (March–April 2016): 114–23.

96. One recent publication addressing synthetic biology from a systems biology perspective is Joana Xavier, Kiran Raosaheb Patil, and Isabel Rocha, “Systems Biology Perspectives on Minimal and Simpler Cells,” Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews 78, no. 3 (September 2014): 487–509.

97. Natalja Strelkowa, “Stochastic Complexity Analysis in Synthetic Biology,” in How Nature Works: Complexity in Interdisciplinary Research and Applications, ed. Ivan Zelinka, Ali Sanayei, Hector Zenil, and Otto E. Rössler (New York: Springer, 2013), 162.

98. Jeffrey Tabor, Travis Bayer, Zachary Simpson, Matthew Levy, and Andrew Ellington, “Engineering Stochasticity in Gene Expression,” Molecular Biosystems 4, no. 7 (July 2008): 754.

99. Sara Hooshangi, Stephan Thiberge, and Ron Weiss, “Ultrasensitivity and Noise Propagation in a Synthetic Transcriptional Cascade,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102, no. 10 (8 March 2005): 3581.

100. Pengcheng Fu and Cliff Hooker, “Outstanding Issues in Systems and Synthetic Biology,” in Systems Biology and Synthetic Biology, ed. Pengcheng Fu and Sven Panke (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 611–42.

101. Fu and Hooker, 613.

102. Michael Bolker, “Complexity in Synthetic Biology: Unnecessary or Essential,” in Synthetic Biology: Character and Impact, ed. Bernd Giese, Christian Pade, Henning Wigger, and Arnim von Gleich (New York: Springer, 2015), 59.

103. Hanczyc, “Structure and the Synthesis of Life,” 26.

104. Hanczyc, 27–28.

105. Hanczyc, 26; Stadler and Stadler, “Replicator Dynamics in Protocells,” 317, 327.

106. Anthony Dunne, “Design for Debate,” in “Neoplasmatic Design,” special issue of AD, ed. Marcos Cruz and Steve Pike, 78, no. 6 (November–December 2008): 92n3.

107. Michael Weinstock, “Morphogenesis and the Mathematics of Emergence,” in “Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies,” special issue of AD, ed. Michael Hensel, Achim Menges, and Michael Weinstock, 74, no. 3 (May–June 2004): 12.

108. Sathish Periyasamy, William Alexander Gray, and Peter Kille, “The Epigenetic Algorithm,” IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, 2008, 3228.

109. CRISPR/Cas9 has spurred the convening of interdisciplinary panels at different universities that are meeting to consider the ethical implications of what they see as an imminent future use of this technology in medicine. See, for example, the event CRISPR Technology: Responsible Discourse about Science and Bioethics, held on May 26, 2016, at UC Davis (http://innovation.ucdavis.edu/events/crispr-technology-responsible-discourse-about-science-and-bioethics). A similar international summit was held in Washington, D.C., early in December 2015 (http://news.berkeley.edu/2015/12/01/crispr-inventor-calls-for-pause-in-editing-heritable-genes/).

110. Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans, Evolving Ourselves: How Unnatural Selection and Nonrandom Mutation Are Changing Life on Earth (New York: Penguin, 2015), 133.

111. Enriquez and Gullans, 135.

112. In 2015, Nature Biotechnology solicited input from fifty scientists to discuss the ethics of using CRISPR for human genetic engineering; see “CRISPR Germline Engineering: The Community Speaks,” Nature Biotechnology 33 (May 12, 2015): 478–86.

113. Enriquez and Gullans, Evolving Ourselves, 136–37.

114. See “3-Person IVF: A Resource Page,” Center for Genetics and Society, available at http://www.geneticsandsociety.org/internal-content/3-person-ivf-resource-page.

115. Enriquez and Gullans, Evolving Ourselves, 142, 157.

116. Christina Cogdell, Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s (2004; repr., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 22–23, 110, 236.

117. Neil Spiller and Rachel Armstrong, “It’s a Brand New Morning,” in “Protocell Architecture,” special issue of AD, ed. Neil Spiller and Rachel Armstrong, 81, no. 2 (March–April 2011): 20, 25.

118. See Roberto Bottazzi, “A Fuller Understanding,” Architectural Review 233, no. 1392 (February 2013): 4 pp.; and “Architecture & Ecology: Tuesday 4 December,” Architectural Review, n.d., available at http://www.architectural-review.com/rethink/architecture-and-ecology-tuesday-4-december/8637625.fullarticle.

119. Botazzi, “Fuller Understanding.”

120. Richard Simon, “The Futures of Humanity: Anarchism, Technoscience, and the Sociology of God,” Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews 42, no. 726 (2013): 726.

121. Wikipedia, s.v. “Transhumanism,” available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/transhumanism, last modified May 7, 2018.

122. Rasmussen et al., Protocells, xx.

123. Susanna Soares, New Organs of Perception, 2007, and Genetic Trace, 2007, available at http://www.susanasoares.com/index.php?id=73 and http://www.susanasoares.com/?id=77. See also Antonelli, Design and the Elastic Mind, 110.

124. Here she is citing Kate Douglas, “Are We Still Evolving?” New Scientist, March 11, 2006, available at http://www.evcforum.net/DataDropsite/NewScientistAreWeEvolving.html.

125. See Aida Edemariam, “A Matter of Life and Death,” The Guardian, March 27, 2008, available at http://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/mar/27/stemcells.medicalresearch. See also Ailsa Stevens, “Debating Deafness and Embryo Selection: Are We Undermining Reproductive Confidence in the Deaf Community?” BioNews, April 21, 2008, available at http://www.bionews.org.uk/page_37988.asp.

126. On state sterilization laws in the United States, see Cogdell, Eugenic Design, 3, 40, 98, 104, 106, 196, 220; Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Phillip Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

127. Armstrong, “How Protocells Can Make ‘Stuff’ Much More Interesting.”

128. Mark Waller, “LaBruzzo Considering Plan to Pay Poor Women $1,000 to Have Tubes Tied,” Times-Picayune, September 23, 2008, available at http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/09/labruzzo_sterilization_plan_fi.html. See Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr’s critique of the “engineering mindset” in “Countering the Engineering Mindset: The Conflict of Art and Synthetic Biology,” in Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature, ed. Alexandra Daisy Ginsbert, Jane Calvert, Pablo Schyfter, Alistair Elfick, and Drew Endy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014), 27–38.

129. Sheila Weiss, “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany, 1904–1945,” in The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia, ed. Mark Adams (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1990), 26, 49; Cogdell, Eugenic Design, 230–32.

130. Enriquez and Gullans, Evolving Ourselves.

131. Lesia Bilitchenko, Adam Liu, and Douglas Densmore, “The Eugene Language for Synthetic Biology,” Methods in Enzymology 498, no. 2 (2011): 153–72.

132. Eric Mennel, “Payments Start for N.C. Eugenics Victims, but Many Won’t Qualify,” All Things Considered, October 31, 2014, available at http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/10/31/360355784/payments-start-for-n-c-eugenics-victims-but-many-wont-qualify.

133. Hunter Schwarz, “Following Reports of Forced Sterilization of Female Prison Inmates, California Passes Ban,” Washington Post, September 26, 2014, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/09/26/following-reports-of-forced-sterilization-of-female-prison-inmates-california-passes-ban/.

134. Ginsberg, “Design Evolution,” 110.

135. Ginsberg, 114, italics added.

136. Dana Kulic, Rob Gorbet, and Ali-Akbar Samadani, “Using Affect to Increase Empathy in Near-Living Architecture,” in Near-Living Architecture: Works in Progress from the Hylozoic Ground Collaboration, 2011–2013, ed. Philip Beesley (Toronto: Riverside Architectural Press, 2014), 64–72.

137. Ginsberg,” Transgressing Biological Boundaries,” 293, 297–98.

138. Ginsberg, “Design Evolution,” 134.

139. Ginsberg, 115.

140. Ginsberg, 115, 120; Ethan Huff, “Biofuels Emit 400 Percent More CO2 Than Regular Fuels,” Natural News, August 10, 2010, available at http://www.naturalnews.com/029421_biofuels_CO2.html. The article is about corn and soy biofuel, not algal biofuel, as is envisioned by some of the synbiodesign projects included in Myers, BioDesign.

141. Ginsberg, 120–22. See also Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994), 91, 246, on the shortage of land to grow feed for horses if we hypothetically returned to animal power for farming.

142. Steve Pike, “Manipulation and Control of Micro-Organic Matter in Architecture,” in “Neoplasmatic Design,” special issue of AD, ed. Marcos Cruz and Steve Pike, 78, no. 6 (November–December 2008): 18.

143. Michael Weinstock and Mehran Gharleghi, “Intelligent Cities and the Taxonomy of Cognitive Scales,” in “System City: Infrastructure and the Space of Flows,” special issue of AD, ed. Weinstock, 83, no. 3 (July–August 2013): 65.

144. Skylar Tibbits, “Design to Self-Assembly,” in “Material Computation: Higher Integration in Morphogenetic Design,” special issue of AD, ed. Achim Menges, 82, no. 2 (March–April 2012): 72.

145. Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).

1. Evelyn Fox Keller, “Organisms, Machines, Thunderstorms: A History of Self-Organization, Part One,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38, no. 1 (2008): 49.

2. Keller, 50.

3. Keller, 47.

4. Keller, 69. She writes, “More precisely, only if the ‘self’ is enlarged to include the system to which the machine is coupled can one speak of self-organization.”

5. Keller, “Organisms, Machines, Thunderstorms: A History of Self-Organization, Part One”; Keller, “Organisms, Machines, Thunderstorms: A History of Self Organization, Part Two,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 39, no. 1 (2009): 1–31; Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (New York: Scribner, 2001); Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2011); Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Ralph Abraham, “The Genesis of Complexity,” in Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences, ed. Edgar Morin and Alfonso Montuori (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 2008); Minka Woermann, “What Is Complexity Theory?” n.d., available at http://www.academia.edu/823563/What_is_complexity_theory; Steve J. Heims, The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).

6. On these intersections, see Charles Jencks, The New Paradigm in Architecture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002); “Charles Jencks on Architecture and Theory,” April 1, 2012, interview with ArchiTeam Point of View, available at http://www.architravel.com/pointofview/interview/charles-jencks-on-architecture-and-theory/; Reinhold Martin, “Complexities,” Journal of Architecture 3, no. 3 (2001): 187–209; Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003); Mark Wigley, “Network Fever,” Grey Room 4 (Summer 2001): 82–122; Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005); Simon Sadler, “An Architecture of the Whole,” Journal of Architectural Education 61, no. 4 (May 2008): 108–29; Greg Lynn, curator, Archaeology of the Digital (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2013); Lynn, curator, Archaeology of the Digital: Media and Machines (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2014); Lynn, curator, Archaeology of the Digital: Complexity and Convention (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2016); Molly Wright Steenson, “Architectures of Information: Christopher Alexander, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte and MIT’s Architecture Machine Group” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2014), available at http://dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/handle/88435/dsp01pn89d6733; Christopher Hight, Architectural Principles in the Age of Cybernetics (New York: Routledge, 2007); Hight, “The Transgenic Territories of Oikonomia,” in The Gen(H)ome Project, ed. Peter Noever and Open Source Architecture (Los Angeles: MAK Center for Art and Architecture, 2006), 38–45; Mario Carpo, The Digital Turn in Architecture, 1992–2012 (London: Wiley, 2013); and Antoine Picon, Digital Culture in Architecture (Basel: Birkhauser, 2010).

7. See Johnson, Emergence, 59; and Thomas Back, Ulrich Hammel, and Paul Schwefel, “Evolutionary Computation: Comments on the History and Current State,” IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation 1, no. 1 (April 1997): 3–17. They write, “But somewhat surprisingly, the researchers in the various disciplines of evolutionary computation remained isolated from each other until the meetings in the early 1990s” (4). Other important publications by John Holland are Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Emergence: From Chaos to Order (New York: Basic Books, 1998); Signals and Boundaries: Building Blocks for Complex Adaptive Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012); and Complexity: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2014).

8. György Kepes, Language of Vision (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944).

9. Martin, “Complexities,” 196.

10. See http://www.aboutus.com/Christopher_Alexander and http://pcad.lib.washington.edu/person/3534/; Steenson, “Architectures of Information,” 31–97.

11. Steenson, 11.

12. Gordon Pask, “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics,” AD, September 1969, 494–96.

13. Usman Haque, “The Architectural Relevance of Gordon Pask,” AD 77, no. 4 (July–August 2007): 54–61. See also Nicholas Negroponte, Soft Architecture Machines (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1976); Steenson, “Architectures of Information,” 9; Molly Wright Steenson, “Nicholas Negroponte, Leon Groisser, Jerome Wiesner, The Architecture Machine Group and the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT Cambridge MA, USA, 1967–1985,” n.d., available at http://radical-pedagogies.com/search-cases/a13-architecture-machine-group-media-lab-massachusetts-institute-technology-mit/.

14. Johnson, Emergence, 46. Ludwig von Bertalanffy is also often credited with this for his General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller, 1968).

15. Johnson, 48–49.

16. See summary of Weaver’s report in Johnson, 50; and Mitchell, Complexity, 13.

17. Johnson, Emergence, 50. Although Johnson states that Weaver’s report to the Rockefeller Foundation in the late 1950s is where Jacobs saw his theory of organized and disorganized complexity, Weaver had published this theory much earlier; see Warren Weaver, “Science and Complexity,” American Scientist 36 (1948): 536–44.

18. Peter Laurence, “Contradictions and Complexities: Jane Jacobs’s and Robert Venturi’s Complexity Theories,” Journal of Architectural Education 59, no. 3 (February 2006): 49.

19. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art in association with the Graham Foundation, 1966), 88.

20. These influences were also occurring at other locations, for example Northern California, where Alexander was working and counterculture theorist Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog began popularizing whole systems architecture. See Sadler, “Architecture of the Whole.”

21. John Frazer, An Evolutionary Architecture (London: Architectural Association Publications, 1995), 10, citing Charles Jencks, Architecture 2000: Predictions and Methods (London: Studio Vista, 1971). Frazer’s Evolutionary Architecture is available at http://issuu.com/aaschool/docs/an-evolutionary-architecture-webocr.

22. See “AA Computer Course” leaflet from 1963, in Box 2007: 55 Ag No 2342, Archives at the Architectural Association, London.

23. Phil Husbands and Owen Holland, “The Ratio Club: A Hub of British Cybernetics,” in The Mechanical Mind in History, ed. Phil Husbands, Owen Holland, and Michael Wheeler (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 91–148.

24. Andrew Pickering, “Cybernetics and the Mangle: Ashby, Beer, Pask,” Social Studies of Science 32, no. 3 (June 2002): 7, available at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.15.882&rep=rep1&type=pdf. The article appeared in French translation in A. Dahan and D. Pestre, eds., La reconfiguration des sciences pour l’action dans les années 1950 (Paris: Presses de l’EHESS, 2002). In 1961, Pask also published with Heinz von Foerster, “A Predictive Model for Self-Organizing Systems, Part I,” Cybernetica 3 (1961): 258–300; and “A Predictive Model for Self-Organizing Systems, Part II,” Cybernetica 4 (1961): 20–55.

25. “Fun Palace Project. Cybernetics Committee. Introductory Document, Circulation List and Basic Plans,” 10–11, DR1995:0188:525:004:009, Cedric Price Archive, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

26. Regarding whether Pask was referring to evolutionary computation, John Frazer in an email to the author on June 20, 2016, stated, “I only heard Gordon talk of genetic code in the sense we used it until 1990+ when he was invited to join our project. I do not think Gordon was thinking of evolutionary computation or genetic algorithms or parameters.” For articles on the history of evolutionary computation, see Back, Hammel, and Schwefel, “Evolutionary Computation,” 3, 12nn1–4, citing Hans-Joachim Bremermann, “Optimization through Evolution and Recombination,” in Self-Organizing Systems, ed. Marshall C. Yovits, George T. Jacobi, and G. D. Goldstein (Washington, D.C.: Spartan, 1962); Richard M. Friedberg, “A Learning Machine: Part I,” IBM Journal 2, no. 1 (January 1958): 2–13; Richard M. Friedberg, Bradford Dunham, and James H. North, “A Learning Machine: Part II,” IBM Journal 3, no. 7 (July 1959): 282–87; and George E. P. Box, “Evolutionary Operation: A Method for Increasing Industrial Productivity,” Applied Statistics 6, no. 2 (1957): 81–101.

27. Frazer, Evolutionary Architecture, 9.

28. See John Frazer, “Reptiles,” AD 4 (1974): 231–39.

29. Frazer, 235.

30. Email from John Frazer to the author, June 20, 2016.

31. See Frazer’s citation of Holland in An Evolutionary Architecture, 13.

32. See Frazer, 63; and http://www.obitko.com/tutorials/genetic-algorithms/.