Investigations

by Stuart A. Kauffman

Book Overview

"It may be that I have stumbled upon an adequate description of life itself."
These modest yet profound words trumpet an imminent paradigm shift in scientific, economic, and technological thinking. In the tradition of Schr dinger's classic What Is Life?, Kauffman's Investigations is a tour-de-force exploration of the very essence of life itself, with conclusions that radically undermine the scientific approaches on which modern science rests--the...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 019512104X
• ISBN13: 9780195121049
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 302 Pages
• Weight: 1.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 9.1" x 6.1"

Customer Reviews

A "Must Read" for those of us who wonder.

Kaufman is not a "science writer", he is one of the worlds senior and most distinguished scientists and he has in this book opened his personal notebook of his most cutting-edge arguments and speculation. Fortunately, he also happens to be an excellent writer. As other reviewers have noted, parts of this book may be difficult to read without prior knowledge of the varied subject areas, but for those of us fascinated by how the universe works this book provides a new high-water mark of explanation. Kaufman pulls together his own and others' ideas in fields including molecular biology, ecology, complexity theory, physics and economics to bring into high relief a significant fact: all around us we see evolving and ever-increasing organizational complexity yet our physical and social sciences have not incorporated that fact into their mainstream theories. Physics has the laws of thermodynamics to specify how the universe becomes more disordered, but no laws to specify the obvious tendency of the universe to become more organized in the presence of an energy gradient. Economics has detailed theories to explain utility maximization and supply and demand balancing given a static set of goods and services, but no mainstream theory to explain the constant increase in economic diversity. Complexity theory provides mathematical tools and simulations that emulate physical complexity but it has not been effectively integrated into mainstream science. Numerous other writers have presented the idea of emergent complexity in biology, such as Capra or Lowenstein, but none that I have read so completely explore, elucidate, extend and defend with experimental evidence the concept as Kaufman does in this book. Buy and read this book. If at first you don't get it, read some related books and come back to it. It is very exciting to feel the approaching wave of a revolution in scientific thinking!

Is increasing complexity the real arrow of time?

This book is bolder and more stimulating than Kauffman's seminal "Origins of Order", which is saying a great deal. And it's easier to read, which isn't saying very much. It's a nightlong fireworks display of ideas, but as you'd expect, the core idea is still that of "order for free." Kauffman argues that the second law of thermodynamics, once its formulation and its assumptions are carefully critiqued, does not imply that the universe is destined to exhibit more and more disorder. On the contrary, the central tendency of the universe is toward ever ramifying complexity. Complex systems, and living things in particular, act as so many Maxwell's Demons, identifying sources - often surprising and unpredictable sources - of exploitable energy, and harnessing them to drive work cycles for their own benefit. And for their own further complexification.The paradigmatic setting for the argument, which he then explores in a variety of other settings, is a soup of organic chemicals. The number of additional chemicals that can be synthesized in one step, Kauffman argues persuasively, grows exponentially as the number of input chemicals grows linearly. Thus there is an explosion of "the adjacent possible". The same is true of the number of potential catalytic relationships among the chemical species in the soup. Simple considerations of probability make it all but inevitable that sets of self-sustaining catalytic processes will arise spontaneously. And if so, can life itself be such a leap?His arguments are qualitative, but in a hard-edged way. The worldview - or cosmos view - that emerges is a stupefyingly optimistic one. This is fuzzy thinking with real hair on its chest.Kauffman acknowledges from the get-go that what he's putting into this volume isn't science. It's "protoscience", intuitions, educated guesses and speculations that may well turn into some spectacular science indeed. The reigning dean of complexity studies is here thinking out loud, carefully and at length, and sometimes out of even his own considerable depth, about the most fundamental questions facing biology, economics, and (perhaps) physics as the new millenium begins. He seems not to have reached a wide readership, but neither did another cross-disciplinary work of similar speculative boldness and depth, Schroedinger's "What Is Life?" Like that small gem, this will be discovered and rediscovered as a classic over the decades to come.

A ?strong buy? for anyone with a science background

Kauffman's previous book `At Home in the Universe' was aimed at the educated but non-specialist reader and extended those proposals for autocatalysis and self-organization in biological and chemical systems first described in Chapters 1 through 6 of his monumental `Origins of Order'. `Origins' was a measured, detailed and sober coverage of a relatively new and vast field - much of it pioneered by Kauffman himself. `At Home...' was a racier and more speculative account of the same field but with new material on the implications for innovation and business growth. It also had additional material on the optimal size of an object and a different method for disturbing co-evolving systems into avalanche behaviour (invasion followed by extinction as opposed to use of the external environment W parameter in `Origins'). In tone, Investigations lies somewhere between the two. The writing has some of the fractured style of At Home that is at once annoying and exhilarating. The scope is awesome and a bit intimidating. The implications - if correct - are seminal. Kauffman's start point is autocatalysis: that it is very likely that self-reproducing molecular systems will form in any large and sufficiently complex chemical reaction. He then goes on to investigate what qualities a physical system must have to be an autonomous agent. His aim is to define a new law of thermodynamics for those systems such as the biosphere that may be hovering in a state of self-organised criticality and are certainly far from thermodynamic equilibrium. This necessitates a rather more detailed coverage of Carnot work cycles and information compressibility than was covered in passing in his earlier books. It leads to the idea that a molecular autonomous agent is a self-reproducing molecular system capable of carrying out one or more work cycles. But Kauffman now pushes on further into stranger and uncharted territory. The Universe, he posits, is not yet old enough to have synthesised more than a minute subset of the total number of possible proteins. This leads to the fundamental proposition that the biosphere of which we are part cannot have reached all its possible states. The ones not yet attained - the `adjacent possible' as Kauffman terms it - are unpredictable since they are the result of the interaction of the large collection of autonomous agents: us - or rather our genes - and all the other evolving things in the external world. His new fourth law of thermodynamics for self-constructing systems implies that they will try to expand into the `adjacent possible' by trying to maximise the number of types of events that can happen next. Readers of the two earlier books will now - temporarily - be on familiar ground: Boolean networks and NKC models, fitness landscapes, order/chaos phase transitions, self-organization and self-organized criticality all make an appearance. Some of the diagrams will be old friends. Kauffman proposes that we live in a self-organised critical bio

Investigations & Notes on the Synthesis of Form

I bought (from a local Independent, sorry ) both _Investigations_ by Stuart Kauffman and _Notes on the Synthesis of Form_ by Christopher Alexander and began reading them simultaneously.The connection between these two works is incredible. One worries the question "what is life" in it's most abstract yet compelling form, while the other worries the question "what is design" also in a most compelling and abstract form. Their discussions and contemplations and, should I say "Investigations?", are by many measures essentially the same.Kauffman, with the help of the ghosts of Maxwell and Schrodinger discusses the partitioning of equilibrium systems such that energy flows are constrained and work is done and then turns that back on itself to consider (autocatalytic) systems where said work is used to provide further constraints, developing and becoming what he dubs an "autonomous agent" which is highly suggestive of "life itself".Alexander partitions some unspecified domain into "form" and "context", stating that a designer defines a problem by this partitioning and then proceeds to seek a "solution" which becomes the literal "form" in a design and it's relation to the "context" is the "function" of the design. While Alexander is an architect and wrote these words 35 years or more ago, he describes a process where architects (and other designers) design a system not far from Kauffman's "autonomous agent". A "good design" is nearly an "autonomous agent" by Alexander's description. Ultimately he will go on to say such a design/system in it's context has "the Quality Without a Name", a quality he himself will describe as being both more and less than "life" itself. Without diminishing Kauffman's excellent work, I recommend Alexander's _Notes_ as an important companion volume written from an intuitive design/architectural theorists point of view. Together, the two bodies of work, represent an overwhelmingly compelling description of qualities in otherwise "nonliving" systems which have the familiar qualities of "life".

Life in a Complex Universe

"Investigations" marks a new phase in Stuart Kauffman's seminal work on self-organization and complexity. In this fascinating extension of his theoretical approach to the generation of order in the universe, he focusses on the idea of the autonomous agent, which forms the basis for a new and more precise definition of the living organism. The autonomous agent, according to Kauffman, is an organization of matter that extracts works from its environment in order to maintain its structural and functional integrity over time. An autonomous agent is one that does work on its own behalf. Kauffman goes into considerable physical detail to show how this is not only possible but inevitable. Because of the intimate relation between work and self-maintenance in this schema, Kauffman speaks of organisms as exemplifying a fourth law of thermodynamics that allows for increasing organizational complexity in the midst of a universe whose entropy is constantly increasing. The fourth law explains how the diversity of the biosphere continues to increase through an exploration of "the adjacent possible," the realm of alternative organizations reachable through single mutations. In this view, the proliferation of life forms is not so much the result of chance as it is of a working out of the natural tendency of existing entities to self-organize into structures of greater and greater complexity. Kauffman's muscular writing in "Investigations" once again demonstrates an exceptional combination of rigorous scientific logic and a poetic vision that encompasses a fertile and abundant universe.