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At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity
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Review
"Kauffman has done more than anyone else to supply the key missing piece of the propensity for self-organization that can join the random and the deterministic forces of evolution into a satisfactory theory of life's order."--Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard University"Stuart Kauffman lucidly argues that, in addition to Darwinian selection, another force, the emergence of self-organized order from apparent chaos determines the beautiful systems that make up the world and cosmos. He contends that emergent order is a feature of many complex systems and general laws that may be defined from their study. It is an exciting and well-written volume."--Barry Blumberg, Fox Chase Cancer Research Center and Nobel Laureate"Every once in a while, you read a book so powerful and with such a radical view that you realize your world is changed forever....Kauffman is a pioneer of the new science of complexity, which sees in the world of nature an inner force of its own, not mystical but scientific. This insight touches something deep in each of us, as we yearn to understand the order we see in nature. Kauffman shares his discovery with us, with lucidity, wit, and cogent argument, and we see his vision. Many will embrace it, as I did, and will gaze on the world anew."--Roger Lewin"Stuart Kauffman gives us a rich and compelling picture of the new principle of self-organization in understanding the emergence of order in complex systems, whether life or society or the economy. The analysis is dramatic without sacrificing scientific accuracy and a careful differentiation between what is known and what is surmised. The hints he has given on the development of the economy and especially of technology will undoubtedly be the basis of a major intellectual development."--Kenneth J. Arrow, Nobel Laureate and Professor Emeritus, Stanford University"Stu Kauffman is an immensely inventive and erudite explorer of the world of ideas and concepts. As with many explorers, not everyone will wish to accompany him but the description of the trip is fascinating."--Phil Anderson, Nobel Laureate in Physics, Princeton University
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About the Author
Stuart Kauffman is a member of the Santa Fe Institute. A MacArthur fellowship recipient, he is the leading thinker on self-organization and the science of complexity as applied to biology.
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Product details
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (September 7, 1995)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0195095995
ISBN-13: 978-0195095999
Product Dimensions:
9.5 x 1.1 x 6.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.0 out of 5 stars
59 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#325,692 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Stuart Kauffman is a brilliant renaissance man; a man who was a playwright, philosopher, physician, and ultimately seminal theorist of the principles of complexity and emergence at the Santa Fe Institute. His ideas are widely influential, groundbreaking, and bear upon the largest questions: what is the origin of life? In the face of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, what explains the richness of order we observe all around us? What are the underlying mathematical principles of emergent phenomena? What are the underlying mathematical principles of evolution (both natural and technological)? Indeed, until Kauffman, I had trouble defining evolution without a tautology at all (i.e. "evolution is survival of the fittest - and 'the fittest' are defined as the ones who survive"). Kauffman gives you a lexicon for understanding evolution, including why there is more radical divergence of form in early evolution and less later on. The principles of emergence bear directly on such diverse topics as ontogeny, economics, the formation of galaxies, coevolution of related species, etc... "At Home in the Universe" is Kauffman's synthesis - his attempt to tie up his decades of work in an explanatory way for the layman. The book is full of intricate diagrams illustrating the concepts discussed and, while sometimes challenging, is readable by any moderately educated person. These ideas have the power to change people's world views - and certainly have transformed my own. Stuart Kauffman's ideas have resonated deeply for me and have inspired me in a multitude of ways.So, what's the problem? It's the writing. Kauffman can't seem to decide if he is writing a book of philosophy or a book of science. He spends an inordinate amount of space discussing the philosophical implications of his ideas, often before he has even presented the ideas - let alone the experimental or theoretical support. As a book of exposition of science, "At Home in the Universe" is almost inexcusably poor. He presents a complex idea accompanied by a complex diagram which he explains. Often, however, he fails to explain the nature of the experiment or research that generated the diagram. He doesn't describe experimental or theoretical support for these ideas. The paucity of descriptions of the science behind these powerful ideas is doubly galling in the presence of repetitive presentation of inappropriate philosophical analysis. Many times in the course of this book I had to throw up my hands in frustration, wishing for exposition of the experiments hinted at in the diagrams - and being given long range cultural and religious context in its stead. For God's sake, let me put the context together for myself! But please give me the evidence.In conclusion, this book ultimately teases. If you have any interest in emergence or complexity theory you will need to read this - the ideas are that profound. However, having read it, you will have to look elsewhere for empirical or theoretical support for the powerful ideas presented here.
This book takes a hard look at how life on earth came to be. Rather than buy into the idea that somehow life evolved via the "blind watchmaker" scenario (i.e., similar to the argument that an army of monkeys sitting at typewriters would eventually compose a great novel), Stuart Kauffman builds a terrific case that the ingredients essential to life are bound to the rules that govern complex adaptive systems. And the very presence of these rules send a strong signal that "we the living", are "we the intended."The author's conviction to both his argument and the science of complex systems is evident throughout the book. If you are coming to this book without much background in complex adaptive systems, you will not be short-changed here. In fact, Kauffman provides extremely rich examples with numerous simple diagrams to educate the reader as he builds his case. Considering the book was published some 7 years ago, I was surprised to see the concept of gene networks given so much attention in the text. Seeing how the latest trend in genomics research is looking at genes and proteins as a regulatory network and attempting to identify specific disease pathways, the science in this book is extremely relevant.
In the still not quite emerged area of emergence aka complexity/systems, some rare books look even better many years after their original publication. At Home in the Universe almost ranks with Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology and Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences) in that regard. This is in part because the area has such a fragmented vocabulary, reflecting a range of approaches which Kauffman is largely across due to his leadership at Santa Fe Institute in its highly productive first decade when its search for interdisciplinary insight outranked the search for marketable applications. In a search I did for a 2007 paper, Kauffman was second only to Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine for citations from the hard science end of the complex systems spectrum.There can be challenges in reading books like this and Bateson's in that significant parts have still not gained wider awareness. They can sound unfamiliar, lack substantive follow up and, I imagine, for those who have not long been on the emergence/complex/systems track, they may seem counter-intuitive. They predate catch phrases like "unknown unknowns" or "black swans" which might make their central relevance to today's challenges more obvious.Kauffman's unifying tactic is exploring how the least accessible parts of the panarchy of natural systems improve their position on fitness landscapes, a mathematical representation reliant on ready mental movement from higher dimensional state spaces to the hills and valleys of familiar physical topography. To that end, he has applied simplified models to search for general principles. His results support a strong case that large gains and radical change come early, after which it becomes an ever more difficult struggle to gainfully inch further from an established viable position. This principle enables him to propose convincing scenarios for the origin of life, the Cambrian explosion and contemporary technological change; arguably the three most significant things we could seek to understand since the origin of the multiverse.This book reflects the peak of Santa Fe's excitement over the edge of chaos--border of order, an idea for which I had come to feel the lone defender early this decade. It is a bemusing sidelight to finally reading this book in 2009, that my own as yet unpublished current research has finally made clear something that had been hinted at but never expressed outright since Wolfram's 1983 notion of Class 4 cellular automata: that we have set up a false dichotomy between chaos and order which we need to leave behind if we are ever to understand that essential complexity arises best in circumstances where there is creative synergy between even deterministic chaos and emergent order.My only real quibble with Kauffman is that he came to this work with a wish to justify his feeling that we should be "at home in the universe" rather than totally defined by historical contingencies, aka accidents. At least he is up front about wanting that finding and, by extension, an endorsement of capitalist/American triumphalism. It would have been preferable if he had come with an open mind to whatever he might find. I suspect reality might prove a bit more contingent than he would be comfortable with, but that his broad principles of fitness landscape navigation might also prove ever more useful as they are better understood.
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