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.
Review
"Courageous....I guarantee that any reader whose imagination has survived an academic education--or has
never been exposed to one--will learn a lot, and be changed forever."
--Ian Stewart, Nature
"A new and far-reaching theory of order in the universe, introduced by a pioneer in that theory's development."
--The Washington Post Book World
"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, author of The Panda's Thumb
"Exciting and well-written."
--Barry Blumberg, Fox Chase Cancer Research Center and Nobel Laureate
"Challenging and audacious."
--The Economist
"A provocative quest."
--Business Week
Oxford University Press Web Site, May, 2000
Summary
A major scientific revolution has begun, a new paradigm that rivals Darwin's theory in importance. At its heart
is the discovery of the order that lies deep within the most complex of systems, from the origin of life, to the
workings of giant corporations, to the rise and fall of great civilizations. And more than anyone else, this revolution
is the work of one man, Stuart Kauffman, a MacArthur Fellow and visionary pioneer of the new science of complexity.
Now, in At Home in the Universe, Kauffman brilliantly weaves together the excitement of intellectual discovery
and a fertile mix of insights to give the general reader a fascinating look at this new science--and at the forces
for order that lie at the edge of chaos.
What we are now only discovering, Kauffman says, is that range of spontaneous order is enormously greater than
we had supposed and, in fact, self-organization is a great undiscovered principle of nature. He contends that complexity
itself triggers self-organization--what Kauffman calls "order for free"--and that if enough different
molecules pass a certain threshold of complexity, they begin to self-organize into a new entity: a living cell.
There is a phase transition when water abruptly turns to ice. Likewise, life may have originated when the mix of
different molecules in the primordial soup passed a certain level of complexity and re-grouped into living entities
(if so, then life is not a highly improbable chance event, but almost inevitable). Using the basic insight of "order
for free" Kauffman illuminates a staggering range of phenomena. Darwin's natural selection has not acted alone,
but in a persistent marriage with self-organization to create the majesty of the biosphere. A new slant can also
be applied to the field of genetic engineering wherein trillions of novel molecules can be generated to find new
drugs, vaccines, and enzymes. Kauffman extends this new paradigm to economic and cultural systems, showing that
all may evolve according to similar general laws.
An exciting exploration into the nature of life, At Home in the Universe provides stunning insights into a new
scientific revolution.
