An Ecological Science of the Artificial?

Herbert A. Simon's book, The Sciences of the Artificial, has been a staple of computational science and a watershed of ideas stimulating the field for 3 decades. Unfortunately, it is too full of ideas to be dealt with adequately in a single commentary. There are many ways one might approach the task of composing a commentary on such an influential work. When faced by a complex treatise, it sometimes helps to focus the essential core of ideas of one thinker by comparing it to that of another, especially if the two stand in sharp contrast. That is the tack taken here.