What I try to do in the book is to trace the chain of relationships running from elementary particles, fundamental building blocks of matter everywhere in the universe, such as quarks, all the way to complex entities, and in particular complex adaptive system like jaguars.

Gell-Mann is responsible together with Pierre Ramond and Richard Slansky and independently of Peter Minkowski Rabindra Mohapatra Goran Senjanovic Sheldon Lee Glashow and Tsutomu Yanagida for the see-saw theory of neutrino masses that produces masses at the large scale in any theory with a right-handed neutrino. He is also known to have played a large role in keeping string theory alive through the 1970s and early 1980s supporting that line of research at a time when it was unpopular.