[acqq]

And the biggest magic that allows for all that complexity to arise is: everything happens in parallel and at the scales that are beyond any intuition of humans. We already know that even extremely simple rules can produce extremely complex-appearing artifacts, like linear congruential generators, fractals, automata, Conway's game of life.

Now, everything is being generated all the time in all the places, in immense amounts of cases, and during billions of years. The results are extremely complex, but those results that we are aware of are only those that survived all the competition and we also see them only as the aggregates.

Humans have problems even just to imagine the exponential growth, because even that is beyond our intuition. In nature, a lot of stuff grows exponentially as long as the resources aren't depleted. That's how the latest pandemics also started to grow, before we limited the possibilities of spreading by the physical separation of human carriers.