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Paul had some ideas about biology that I enjoyed thinking of as a little bit crackpot. One of our recurring bones of contention was the role of selection in evolution. Paul, ever focused on the generative, the emergent, saw evolution mainly as a process of exploration of the phenotype space. For Paul, evolution's drivers were diversification and complexification: evolution's creative processes, rather than the competition and winnowing that most biologists (starting with Darwin) focus on.

I remember one conversation in particular in which Paul said to me that evolution is like diffusion over the space of all possible forms. I asked, "Okay, so what's doing the diffusing?" Paul smiled and answered with that slight added emphasis that he used in order to let people know that he was about to pack a paragraph's worth of meaning into the very next word he was to say: "Matter."

I actually quite like that. Most biologists talk only about molecules, cells, organisms, species. More than any other scientist I know, Paul talked about life. He anthropomorphized life, and he considered (perfectly rightly, but who but him would bother to talk about it?) life to be a mere subset of matter.

It comforts me to think that Paul, though no longer part of that subset, is still participating in evolution, that generative, creative, emergent process which he found to be so beautiful.