Maybe drift, maybe not: Catching up on some crushed-trees reading, I found that the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) has a three-year Packard grant (yes, those Packards) to study robustness. It will build on previous SFI work in, among other areas, emergence and evolutionary dynamics.

From the SFI Bulletin: ...[R]obustness may be key to survival. The recovery of ecosystems from natural disasters, the ability of cells to tolerate insult, the ability of a computer to compute reliably in the presence of noise or defective components, the viability of an economic organization -- in all these processes, it is robustness (rather than, say, optimization) that plays the central role. Yet researchers in the many disciplines for which robustness is a relevant concept are typically hard put to even define the term, much less to contemplate fundamental principles that might apply to general contexts. [The] SFI scientific initiative...will explore the origins, mechanisms, and implications of robustness in physical, computational, biological, and ecological systems.

The Bulletin story about the Packard program is very detailed. The same issue also carries articles on networks and entropy that I found equally fascinating. You can read it -- and other issues -- online (Vol. 15, No. 2). I recommend it.