From the foreward: "... it emerges that nature itself is neither complex or simple. Complexity is a matter of how the observer specifies the system either explicitly or implicitly in the way questions are cast."
"In the face of complexity is it essential to distinguish model and observables from the material system, and to recognize that the mode must invoke a scale and a point of view."
pp 12: Life is rare in numbers, so it must be a small part of the picture. -- parallels to ALife's: if we set things up just right, life will happen.
pp 13: "biologists have convinced themselves that the processes of life do not violate any known physical principles"
pp 13-14: "modern biologists are also, most fervently, evolutionists; they believe wholeheartedly that everything about organisms is shaped by essentially historical, accidental factors, which are inherently unpredictable and to which no universal principles can apply." -- Well, they could be just highly probable, if not necessary. But the thing about Boltzman in Swenson & Turvey provides counterpoint.
pp 14: "this oracle [System Theory] speaks not of laws or principles, as physics does; as yet it can speak only in parables."
pp 22: “The crux of the matter is that, when one tries to embody our recognition criteria for organisms in an explicit list, we find nothing on that list that cannot be mimicked by, or embodied in, some patently inorganic system.”