ABSTRACT
“It is essentially meaningless to talk about complex adaptive systems being in equilibrium: the system can never get there. In fact, if the system ever does reach equilibrium it isn't just stable. It's dead. And by the same token, there is no point in imagining that agents in the system can ever “optimize” their fitness, or their utility, or whatever. The space of possibilities is simply too vast; they have no practical way of finding the optimum.”
