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.

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

• Nature always produces living structure because it follows a process of unfolding wholeness; human designers can create non-living structure by violating this process.claim0.918
  Core distinction between natural and designed configurations, explaining why properties are ubiquitous in nature but rare in bad design.
• The principle of unfolding wholeness is a new principle, not automatically given by non-linear dynamics, catastrophe theory, or bifurcation theory, necessary to explain the appearance of living structure.claim0.884
  Alexander's central assertion that existing frameworks are insufficient and a genuinely new principle is required
• The principle of unfolding wholeness is purely geometrical in character, not arithmetical and not energy-based, distinguishing it fundamentally from least action.claim0.861
  Alexander's characterization of what makes his principle novel relative to least-action formulations
• The creation of living structure cannot be done in any other way.claim0.853
• Life and living structure will appear in the world inevitably because the mathematical way space gives rise to structure necessarily reinforces wholeness as part of its most normal evolution.claim0.850
  Alexander's strongest ontological claim: living structure is not probabilistically improbable but mathematically necessary given the principle of unfolding wholeness
• My claim in Book 2 is that 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.quote0.843
  Central thesis statement of the chapter, encapsulating the core idea that living structure arises effortlessly from structure-preserving transformations.
• In nature, unfolding often consists of a process that establishes local symmetries one by one.claim0.842
  Connects biological morphogenesis to architectural process.
• The unfolding of wholeness through structure-preserving transformations must inevitably create the fifteen properties.hypothesis0.841