The success of adaptation comes from the freedom the center-forming process has to make each center strong in relation to nearby centers.

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

• The field of centers cannot be created as a by-product of some existing process; it comes about only when the entire process is organized and concentrated on creating a living field.claim0.810
  Focus on anything else yields something else.
• The core of all living process is step-by-step adaptation — the modification and evolution which happen gradually in response to information about the degree to which the emerging structure supports the whole.claim0.808
  Definition of the essential mechanism of living structure formation.
• A living process only rarely creates living centers from scratch; it must use pre-established generic centers — patterns — encoding successful adaptationsclaim0.800
  Grounded in Holland's schemata theory and the biological gene analogy
• In buildings, especially, the success of the process will be judged by the extent to which these middle-range entities appear with their own distinct symmetries, with their own definite and distinct force as strong centers.claim0.796
  Proposes middle-range entity quality as the criterion for judging the success of a building process
• The formation of centers is guided by generic patterns which play the role of genes.claim0.795
  Analogy to biology, placing pattern languages as the genetic code for living built environments.
• The greater life in the animal comes from the field of centers which is created there, not from copying or 'realism'.claim0.790
  Extension of the previous claim, tying life directly to centers.
• I believe that these properties arise because they are the principal ways in which centers can be strengthened by other centers.quote0.788
  The central insight of the chapter: the fifteen properties all reduce to ways centers help each other
• The intricate and beautiful structure of living centers comes about naturally, and most of the time without effort, as a result of the repeated application of structure-preserving transformations to the wholeness which exists.claim0.786
  Central interpretive claim of the chapter, asserting that living structure is an effortless natural outcome of structure-preserving transformations.