I found the discussion of mankind's role in nature to be provocative, controversial, and a bit overly optimistic. The author equated humans to any other species, and in a sense excused our modifications to nature as something natural to any species. While many tend to think of nature as in a constant state of equilibrium, nature is actually always in flux. As species alter landscapes, landscapes simultaneously alter species. Form is created through forces between both.
The material that I found most applicable to architecture from this reading was the examination of 'weak' emergence vs. 'strong' emergence. Weak emergence basically states that all of nature's phenomena are derived from material processes that can be reduced to the laws of physics. Strong emergence, on the contrary, claims that forms and behaviors are too complex to be reduced to the cumulative effects of the laws of physics. I side with the existence of strong emergence, and agree that many forms and behaviors cannot simply be explained by their parts. An example that comes to mind is that a hammer is composed of a formed metal head which is attached to a wooden handle. One would not really consider the qualities of a hammer until it is broken. You would be left with a piece of metal and a splintered chunk of wood, which of course could no longer accomplish the task that it would be able to as a cohesive object. In the same way, buildings are just physical organizations of metal, wood, stone, and glass, but the culture that takes place inside it make it an irreducible entity.
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