Nature manages to create structures that are members of C_living by way of structure-preserving transformations.

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

• Living structure can only be created by structure-preserving transformations.claim0.873
  A strong normative claim from Book 2 recapitulated in the appendix as a verifiable and surprising conclusion.
• Nature always produces living structure because it follows a process of unfolding wholeness; human designers can create non-living structure by violating this process.claim0.858
  Core distinction between natural and designed configurations, explaining why properties are ubiquitous in nature but rare in bad design.
• Structure-preserving transformations govern the emergence of all structure in nature, not just in buildings and art.hypothesis0.849
  Alexander's conjecture extending the unfolding framework from architecture to natural phenomena generally.
• Any part of the world we build will have life if it is created by structure-preserving transformations, and will not have life if it is not created by structure-preserving transformations.claim0.841
  The central thesis of the chapter.
• The creation of living structure cannot be done in any other way.claim0.835
• In nature the principle of unfolding wholeness creates living structure nearly all the time. Human designers, who are not constrained by this unfolding, can violate the wholeness if they wish to, and can therefore create non-living structure as often as they choose.quote0.829
  Encapsulates the distinction between natural and human-made order, central to Alexander's critique of contemporary architecture.
• The existence of living structure, as defined in The Nature of Order, requires modifications in our physical picture of the world, not only in the picture we have of architecture.claim0.826
  The closing claim of the chapter's mid-book appendix, asserting that the theory of centers has implications for physics.
• Even death and destruction in nature are structure-preserving because they preserve and extend the whole, unlike human image-driven processes.claim0.825
  Distinction between natural and human destruction.