An analogy between the law of chemistry and US highway system
From The Origins of Life: A Case is made for the descent electrons, appeared in American Scientist:
Consider the requirements of the U.S. Interstate highway system. The system includes an enormously complex network of roads; major infrastructure devoted to extracting oil from the Earth, refining oil into gasoline and distributing gasoline along the highways, a major industry devoted to producing automobiles; and so on. If we wanted to explain this system in all of its complexity, we would not ask whether cars led to roads or roads led to cars, nor would we suspect that the entire system had been created from scratch as a giant public works project. It would be more productive to consider the state of transport in preindustrial America and ask how the primitive foot trails that must certainly have existed had developed into wagon roads, then paved roads and so on. By following this evolutionary line of argument, we would eventually account for the present system in all its complexity without needing recourse to highly improbable chance events.
In the same way, we argue, the current complexity of life should be understood as the result of a multistep process, beginning with the catalytic chemistry of small molecules acting in simple networks—networks still preserved in the depths of metabolism—elaborating these reaction sequences through processes of simple chemical selection, and only later taking on the aspects of cellularization and organismal individuality that make possible the Darwinian selection that biologists see today. Our task as origin-of-life researchers is to look at the modern highways and see what they reveal about the original foot trails.
Looks like Chemists are trying to learn from civil engineers and town planners. Although I don't believe there is any universal law to explain the growth of networks of different categories (say, engineering networks or biological networks)---since the mechanisms and incentives that induce the network growth are quite different--the patterns of different networks, in the final outcome or in the process of incremental change, might exhibit similar features, which is interesting.