The "Maximum Power Principle" is endlessly fascinating to me. It somehow attempts to address how you can have turtles and cheetahs both in the same environment.

It has found it's way into literary and philosophical explorations, with folks like Thomas Pynchon and Robert Pirsig dealing with the subject either directly or indirectly. Pirsig in his philosophical explorations in the novel "Lila" attempts to grasp how it is that nature seems to move (if you accept both big bang theory and Darwinist natural selection) from the simple to the complex, i.e., it converts raw simple energy from the simplist atom (hydrogen)upward into increasingly complex structures.

Interestingly, this seems to run backwards to the ideas of good engineering. While engineers attempt to build "elegant" devices with fewer and fewer parts and by way of reducing elaboration(motto of the modernist architects, "less is more") nature seems to make a project of moving from simple to ever more elaborate (from the single celled organism to the complicated multi-celled mammals, again if you accept Darwinism)

The arts while claiming to be more in touch with nature as it progresses actually runs backwards to nature, which is all about elaboration and variety as it develops, while in the arts "minimalism" is "modernism",
Fascinating fundamental stuff I could talk about all day, but I am trying to comply with leanen of TOD US's request for brevity! :-)

RC