Product Description

In the tradition of Schrödinger's classic What Is Life?, this book is a tour-de-force investigation of the basis of life itself, with conclusions that radically undermine the scientific approaches on which modern science rests-the approaches of Newton, Boltzman, Bohr, and Einstein. Kauffman's At Home in the Universe, which The New York Times Book Review called "passionately written" and nature named "courageous," introduced pivotal ideas about order and evolution in complex life systems. In investigations, Kauffman builds on these theories and finds that classical science does not take into account that physical systems--such as people in a biosphere--effect their dynamic environments in addition to being affected by them. These systems act on their own behalf as autonomous agents, but what defines them as such? In other words, what is life? By defining and explaining autonomous agents and work in the contexts of thermodynamics and of information theory, Kauffman supplies a novel answer to this age-old question that goes beyond traditional scientific thinking. Much of Investigations unpacks the progressively surprising implications of his definition. Kauffman lays out a foundation for a new concept of organization, and explores the requirements for the emergence of a general biology that will transcend terrestrial biology to seek laws governing biospheres anywhere in the cosmos. Moreover, he presents four candidate laws to explain how autonomous agents co-create their biosphere and the startling idea of a "co-creating" cosmos. A showcase of Kauffman's most fundamental and significant ideas, Investigations presents a new way of thinking about the basics of general biology that will change the way we understand life itself--on this planet and anywhere else in the cosmos.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #298042 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 308 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
As a rule, when a distinguished scientist says he's come up with a fourth law of thermodynamics, he's wrong. In Investigations, Stuart Kauffman may be the exception.

The three laws of thermodynamics have been summarised as: "you can't win", "you can't break even", and "you can't get out of the game". Kauffman's candidate for a fourth law is: "but the game keeps getting more complicated, and there are always different ways to play."

One of Kauffman's key concepts is that of the adjacent possible. Imagine a set of things that exists in a particular system (such as a group of reacting chemicals, or an ecological community, or the kinds of toys available in a capitalist economy). The adjacent possible is the set of things that are only one step away from actual existence. Like potential energy in physics, the adjacent possible is a metaphysical idea with real utility.

You can think of "normal science" (as described by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) as proceeding step by step into the adjacent possible. Most self-styled revolutionary scientific treatises are really crackpottery. They don't stop in the adjacent possible; they go wandering across the landscape and over the speculative horizon. Investigations may be the real thing. Kauffman is pushing into the adjacent possible at many points, from biology, chemistry, thermodynamics, and economics. As he says, "whatever Investigations is--useful, as I hope, or foolish--it is not normal science." --Mary Ellen Curtin

About the Author
Stuart Kauffman, winner of the MacArthur "genius" award, is a founding member of the Santa Fe Institute, the leading center for the emerging sciences of complexity. A major force in science and its applications to the business world, he formed BiosGroup LP in 1996 in partnership with Ernst & Young. The author of previous bestsellers Origins of Order and At Home in the Universe, he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Customer Reviews

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 biosphere with a power-law distribution of small to large avalanches of speciation and extinction events. And this is not limited to the biosphere: economic trends may also follow such a power law. He looks briefly at evolutionary strategies and points out that a robust strategy must contain alternative ways to do things in case the primary way becomes blocked. Phase transitions in combinatorially difficult Ksat problems are introduced along with their Hausdorf dimensionality which gives an indication of how hard it will be to get to an even better solution at any point in an optimisation process. The more conflicting constraints there are, the harder the going gets; for NKC enthusiasts this is like wading in the treacle of a rugged high-K landscape!).

The familiar ground suddenly gives way. Kauffman introduces Lee Smolin's idea (vide his 'The Life of the Cosmos') that our universe is a result of the interaction and Darwinian selection of many competing universes. Daughter universes, Smolin has proposed, are born out of black holes, and cosmic natural selection will thus preferentially select those universes which tend to maximise the number of black holes. Kauffman is chary of this because he wants a theory which gives a universe as complex as ours roughly poised between expansion and contraction. He returns to the 'adjacent possible' to point out correctly that classical general relativity assumes that the configuration space of the universe can be pre-stated whereas we cannot do so even for the biosphere. Quantum mechanics and spin networks offer a way out, but there is uncertainty about how the values of the twenty finely-poised physical constants were chosen. Kauffman concludes with describing how we get back from eleven-dimensional strings to three unfurled spatial dimensions plus time by compactification of the remainder into tiny rolls in Calabi-Yau space.

Anyone who struggled with 'At Home...' will be way out of their depth towards the end. Those with a physical sciences background will have their preconceptions challenged and horizons widened. Those interested in the genesis and evolution of a book should read Kauffman's Sante Fe preprint with the more elaborate title of 'Investigations: The nature of autonomous agents and the worlds they mutually create... Finally, by far the best technical review of self-organisation, phase transitions and percolation is "Avalanche dynamics in evolution, growth and depinning models" by Paczuski, M., Maslov, S. and Bak, P. (Phys Rev E January 1996) - highly recommended.

Interesting...very interesting
Stu is a biologist (come business consultant) who has never received the mainstream academic recognition he probably deserves. His ideas are certainly not easy reading for 'mainstream' scientists, but I feel his unique positiong in the vanguard of complexity science give him some insight.

This book stands midway between his previous books. It is more technical than At Home in the Universe, but not to the extent of Origins of Order. He continues similar themes: the emergence of complex, interactive systems can be seen as a neccesary function of the rules of the universe, rather than as a bizarre random occurrence. This time, however, he is applying the ideas to the notion of an autonomous agent, rather than thinking purely in biological terms.

Which made me wonder who this book is aimed at. Stuart assumes that you know a lot of general science knowledge (certainly a lot more biology and biochemisty than your average popular science reader - see the other reviews here). But on the other hand he doesn't analyse his theories in a rigorous way (in fact he keeps saying how they can't be analysed just yet, more research is required).

I think his insight is spot on, but the experience of reading the book left me slightly underwhelmed.

Oh and one final point: be careful of his tendency to occassionally remember he is writing 'literature'. The odd paragraph burst forth with a myriad of bright and natal metaphorical buds: which had a nasty habit of making me giggle!

Unreadable
I'm not sure who this book is written for. Although at some points the author assumes the reader to have little knowledge, explaining the basics of what DNA is (together with a half-hearted attempt at a diagram), by then he has filled 20 pages with phrases such as "eluctible holism", and he immediately afterwards starts talking about the "ligation of 3' to 5' phosophodiester bonds" and the size of the "human immune repertoire", without explanation.
The very first word of the book - in the title of the first chapter - is "Prolegomenon", and it's not a teaser to be explained later, you're supposed to know what that means.
It's very frustrating because the content is very interesting and the arguments well thought through, but the author makes me work so hard to try to follow them that I cannot enjoy them or be certain that I fully understand them.