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To what extent are all of them systematically determined by natural selection?
A certain range of patterns emerges—almost all of which turn out to be quite similar to patterns that one sees on actual animals.
And in fact, to do so requires absolutely no sophisticated ideas from mathematics or elsewhere: all it takes is an understanding of how to apply simple rules repeatedly.
For with calculus there was finally real success in taking abstract rules created by human thought and using them to reproduce all sorts of phenomena in the natural world.
For it is what allows us to characterize all sorts of physical systems by just specifying a few parameters such as temperature and chemical composition—and avoids us always having to know the details of the initial conditions and history of each system.
And in fact, this is precisely why it is conceivable that a simple program could reproduce all the complexity we see in physics.
Almost all the results that were obtained are still military secrets, but I do not believe that any phenomena like the ones described in this chapter were discovered.
But ultimately the whole point of causal networks is that their connections represent all possible ways that effects propagate.
For everyday experience—together with all sorts of detailed experiments—strongly support the idea that so long as there are no effects from acceleration or external forces, physical systems work exactly the same regardless of how fast they are moving.
It turns out that when there is no matter present the Einstein equations simply state that the spacetime Ricci tensor—and thus all of its projections—are exactly zero.
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