At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity

The basic idea of Kauffman's book is that the complexity we see in nature (including life or technology) is contingent to math, i.e. can be explained and predicted by mathematical reasoning. The same is true of statistical thermodynamics and evolution. He states that Darwin's evolutionary theory explains only how complex life emerged from simple life, but it does not explain how simple life emerged from matter. There is probably a larger jump in complexity from matter to the first simple cell, than from that simple cell to a modern human being. Darwin does not explain that first jump. Kauffman doesn't either even though he is convincing in showing that life must have started through autocatalytic sets of molecules. He points out that these sets are self-organizing, stable and can vary as a reflex to external stimuli. What he mentions, but does not explain, is that autocatalytic sets can (or must) self-reproduce, a necessary step before evolution sets in. On page 66 of the paperback edition he states that "such breaking in two happens spontaneously as such [auto-catalytic] sets increase in volume", but, maddeningly, he does not explain how or why. One has to wonder: if life is such a necessary result of matter (therefore the title "at home in the universe") why then has it proven so difficult to synthesize anything approaching life in the laboratory? He doesn't say.

The book is full of incredibly interesting ideas. He explains ontogeny (the transformation of a fertilized egg to a highly complex and differentiated organism) using a simple model of on/off enzymes which allows him to build a Boolean network in which different cell types correspond to different "attractors", which are intrinsic in such a network. He shows that the same relationship that holds between number of attractors and size of a network, also holds between number of cell types and size of DNA of a wide range of organisms. Very impressive. He goes on to discuss things like fitness landscapes and genetic algorithms, the edge between boring order and supracritical instability where the really interesting stuff happens, the co-evolution of coupled systems, the structure of efficient companies or countries, and more.

The only criticism I have is about his poetical language that does indeed resemble fluff; anyone who even partly understands his ideas would be excited enough without all that sauce. Also I missed a deeper development, the book does point into one interesting direction and then jumps into another matter, leaving one hungering for more. But maybe this is the author's intent.

This is an excellent book even though it resembles more a symphony of ideas than a theorem. Very highly recommended: a mind opener.

...in either direction, for or against this book. Extremely high variance reviews are a good sign that reviewers are posting their own preconceptions, rather than reactions to this book.

There is a lot of good stuff in here. The descriptions of the patch procedure and simulated annealing, for instance, are very nice. This book can be useful to the motivated general reader, and to a scientist who wants to see the very basics of some novel ideas. It can also be useful for those familiar with complexity as an account of how different pieces fit together.

It's important to remember that the book is not a text in, say, biochemistry. Rather, it's about a way to see the world. At this stage of the idea development life cycle and in a basic treatment like this, it would be counterproductive to insist that these modeling tools reproduce everything we know or start at the level of complication of a mature science. If the book deals in toy examples that relate to a different view for pieces of the world and how they relate, it has done most of its job.

On the other hand, the book definitely has the mildly unpleasant tenor of a popularization. So, for example, any new idea is dressed up as revolutionary. Kauffman is actually better about this than many authors, especially in this field, but it's still palpable.

It is also written with all the mid-'90s euphoria over complexity. It is not clear that it will take as far as the gurus envision, but it is fun to think about -and this book is a good way to start.

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I read this book when it first came out. At the time I thought it made some profound insights that would surely change the face of evolutionary theory. Of course not having a professional involvement in these matters, I considered the possibility that I had just succumbed to a layman's tendency to too easily say, "Wow!" For a year or two, when I talked about this book and its ideas to friends professionally involved in the biological sciences, they often reinforced that initial concern of mine, but the idea just wouldn't leave my mind no matter how much I doubted myself. To me these ideas presented in this book stand to become new landmarks in thinking about evolution and biology.

In the years since, evolving reaction to Stuart Kauffman's ideas have finally provided some measure of confirmation to me of these initial impressions. Evolutionary biologists have started to deal with these ideas seriously though I think much of the community has yet to realize their significance. This book has not proved just the flash in the pan that many pop science and psuedo-science ideas and books do. It only becomes more important with time. His ideas earned some serious treatment from Daniel Dennett in his profound book "Darwin's Dangerous Idea." Though I think Dennett only vaguely grasped the importance of the ideas, he clearly did not place them in the same league with the nostalgic crackpot evolution "debunkers." Kauffman proposes no magical "skyhooks" here. If evolution through natural selection reveals the universal acid, then the emergent "order for free" of thermodynamically open systems reveals the universal base, and promises to change our understanding of the universe in every bit as profound ways. Put them together and you get the salt of life.

Kauffman's ideas in his books ("At Home in the Universe" for the layman, and "The Origin of Order" for the more technically minded) anticipate the shenanigans of the currently most popular evolution "debunker," Michael Behe, in "Darwin's Black Box." (see my Amazon review of that book as well). Behe will never escape the fact that Kauffman's work came before his, and that he failed to properly and honestly deal with Kauffman's ideas, preferring instead to pretend and imply that Kauffman represented some dismissible fringe crackpot. If he had addressed Kauffman honestly, his own thesis would have proved irrelevant, and his whole book would have had to deal with Kauffman. Behe claimed to base his ideas on some ad hoc concept of "irreducible complexity" which he invented in total disregard of whole fields of research, both Kauffman's and others', already done on the phenomena of complexity.

Kauffman's theories of emergent order for free, and complex systems do not overturn the theories of evolution through natural selection. Some in the field of biological evolution have mistakenly believed that represents the intent of Kauffman's theories. In his book he clearly states that they do not. His ideas present a natural compliment to evolution through natural selection. Though Kauffman makes a few passing references to "God," these references have nothing to do with his theories and only serve literary purposes. Perhaps this reflects some awareness of the cultural not to mention scientific minefield he walks through. Intelligent design plays no role in Kauffman's ideas, and his ideas should play no role in intelligent design hypotheses either.

In the end Kauffman's theories put to rest the orthodox evolutionary picture that life and humanity represent an "accident," glorious or otherwise as well as our understandable intuitive objections to that picture. Life, even intelligent life, while not necessarily guided by a divine intelligence, has a certain inevitability to it. If we didn't happen, something very similar to us would have happened eventually somewhere. The mystery of initial biogenesis clearly unravels with Kauffman's revelation of the mathematics of autocatalytic sets and their inevitable emergence in thermodynamically open complex systems. If the jargon of the previous sentence confuses you, do not despair. Kauffman does a wonderful job of walking the reader through all of these concepts so that his ideas become accessible to both the layman as well as the expert. If you made it through high school science, you can make it through, "At Home in the Universe."

Kauffman takes some time at the end of the book for philosophical musings which serve as a great reward to the reader who gets there. Among other things at the end, while musing about more cultural applications of his ideas, he talks briefly about Dawkin's idea of "meme" (introduced in "The Selfish Gene") several years before it became such a popular idea with Richard Brodie's "Virus of the Mind", Aaron Lynch's "Thought Contagion" (both published at about the same time), and most recently Susan Blackmore's "The Meme Machine."

Don't miss this book. It presented the cutting edge at the time he wrote it, and it promises to stay on the cutting edge for decades to come. It only stands to become sharper with time, because Kauffman has far more than just hyped lay enthusiasts like myself behind these ideas. This book had to happen. If not by Stuart Kauffman, then somebody else sooner or later. As Daniel Dennett would say these ideas represent eventually forced moves in the evolutionary space of scientific theory. I feel fortunate that someone as accessible as Stuart Kauffman made them.

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I am always happy when I finish a book. The first reason could be that the book was good, and it left somewhat smarter than before. The other case is because the book was not so good and I am happy no to read it any longer. Unfortunately, this book belongs to the second category. Unfortunately, really, because the subject and the hypothesis developped in "At Home In The Universe" definitly deserve a better treatment.

I was brought to this book by the excellent "Here Be Dragons" (by S. Levay and D. Koerner ), which had a complete chapter on self-organization theories and the origins of life. Based on this captivating first glimpse into the world of artificial life experiments, I decided that the book by Kauffman was worth a try. Well...

First, the good news: the book does explain all the generalities and details on self-organization and the possible applications, from the origins of life to economics and politics. The ideas are very innovative, and even if those theories may not correctly explain everything (a possibility wisely pointed out by the author), they do add something new and worth exploring. The chapters on autocatalytic chemical sets are the most interesting, and convinced me that luck and Darwinian evolution do not completely explain why life exists, and how it achieved such a complexity.

Now, the bad news. The writing style is a killer: egocentric, prophetic, repetitive, grandiloquent and lyrical. Egocentric, because the author keeps on talking at the first person, which is annoying and useless. Prophetic, because the author believes too much in the ultimate success of his own theories. Repetitive because having ten or more paragraphs in a row explaining the exact same thing again and again cannot be qualified differently. Grandiloquent and lyrical can be good when Sagan does it, but most of the time it's just clumsy. With this book, you will go even lower: ridicule.

Conclusion: 3 stars: 4 stars for the ideas and 1 star for the style. The subject deserves a better treatment. So, if someone knows of another book on the subject, please, contact me.

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Stuart Kaufman's At Home in the Universe is a lay redaction his scientific hypotheses from his Origins of Order, a rich, fascinating, sophisticated, and complementary set of hypotheses added to Darwin's theories of evolution. For the moment, at least, they are the promising fruit of speculative or theoretical biological hypotheses (with physics, chemistry, geology, paleontology, mathematics, game theory, and economics thrown in), but they go a long way to filling in many of the gaps that strict Darwinists seem content to ignore. And some of his hypotheses, he readily admits, are heretical.

One of the obvious problems, if not primary one, that Kaufman sets to answer, Is how can natural selection work, culling the fittest to survive, without something to act on? In other words, natural selection operates on the already existent (i.e., regressive engineering), not in the formation of the entity itself. Another problem is that 4 billion years, long as that is, is still not sufficient time for natural selection to have acted through a totally random, step-by-step process in determining today's survivors. Even 100 billion years would not be enough. Another problem is how could so many species have come into existence and failed to survive (99.9%), leaving a mere 100 million for the present, in the span of a mere 4 billion years (mathematically impossible on Darwin's theories alone).

The central theme of Kaufman's work is Self-organized Criticality, a scientific twist on the notion of irreducible complexity (from the Discovery Institute's lexicon, no less), where a minimal degree of inherent complexity in a subcritical-supercritical phase transition is what spontaneously orders the animate world and generates and sustains life in accord with other, as yet, unknown, but implicit laws. From the moment that a sufficiently critical diversity of molecules reached the ideal phase transition, life itself was "spontaneously generated" as inevitable, not by accident. Once life appeared, the acts of natural selection, adaptation, coevolution, evolution of coevolution, cellular, morphological, and physiological differentiation, ontogeny, niches, populations, stable cum-chaotic dynamics, etc., could operate, but in addition to forces beyond natural selection. And while speculative, apparently many scientists share Kaufman's intuitions, inferences, and insights.

But the "other" force or forces is not mystical, much less divine, even if they may be truly awesome. Rather, it is in the nature of the universe, and more particularly in our evolving earth, that these implicit laws work in tandem with Darwin's laws. At this point, these laws are posited from the empirical knowledge we do have, but have not yet demonstrated in the scientific manner to make them even hypotheses. But Kaufman's speculative biology is not a whimsical or arbitrary metaphysics, but logical inferences based on laws and facts already in place. Having done the easy work (thinking the notions of what these other general laws of nature must be like), now science must work in earnest to confirm or reject his speculative hypotheses.

The key word and concept throughout this humorous, heady, and exacting exposition is "complexity" and within the manifold complexities of lives, environments, and mutually intersecting dynamics is a spontaneous order that arises "for free" that in turn sustains stable and steady systems just at the subcritical-supercrticial phase transition (e.g., horizon, or "edge of chaos"). Another key word and concept is "dynamic." Steady-state and homeostasis are often thought of as a static plateau, but that is mistaken, as such states are actually in a fluctuating dynamic at the phase transition between equilibrium (death) and disequilibrium (disorder). Indeed, on many different levels, living organisms are born, dwell, and die precisely at this phase transition between the subcritical (stasis, moribund) and supercritical (chaotic, disordered) states. And the key thesis is that order ("for free") is embedded in the delicate balancing act precisely at this phase transition.

Kaufman extrapolates some of these implicit biological laws and applies them to human cultural and technological advancement. The "fit" is remarkably uncanny, helping us to understand some of the dynamics of technological improvements (and diminishing returns), innovation, extinction, and spontaneity of the economy. Perhaps the most salient features are the concepts of "dynamic" and "spontaneous."

Moreover, if an analogy can be drawn from the biosphere and ecology to the social and political realms, the overwhelming preponderance of biological evidence screams complexity, diversity, and interdependence of organisms and their environments, which arise spontaneously and reciprocally to each other, in a constant dynamic that is vibrant, active, and always on the threshold of "chaos," but retains some stability through change. It is only those social and political forms that are "adaptive" that are socially and politically the "fittest," and democracy and market economies are obviously the most adaptive mechanisms to adapt to changing human needs.

Frederick Hayek addressed himself to these very issues over 50 years ago, and called the market economy and democracies "spontaneous" associations, in contradistinction to "planned" economies and governments. The former "adapt" to changing environments and circumstances, while the latter lack flexibility, and thus do not easily yield to adaptive mechanisms. "Planned" economies attempt to calculate rationally human desires, motivations, and needs in either an abstract or a priori fashion, then calculate the mode of production, the degree, and whether to accommodate, as if some "Absolute Human Mind" could anticipate all contingencies and changes by a simple mathematical formula. The problem is that bureaucrats are notoriously theory-laden and too calculating to include, much less advance, diversity (think Medicare Part D for "planned" absurdity). In practice, socialisms impede innovation and stifle ingenuity. With no means of adaptation, there is no "fittest," much less any mechanism to adapt to the actual dynamics of the world.

Communism's planned economy is an extreme case of an irrational calculus asserting what the government will allow, applying the lowest-common denominator as a criterion of sufficiency. We all know of the U.S.S.R.'s food lines, limited products, forced housing, inferior merchandise, and minimal labor investment. But even weaker forms of the rational calculus, such as socialism, does not do much better. At least their democracies allow policies to change, even if it becomes years for government to adapt to the new exigencies. Even the most socialized societies have "capitalist" outlets, to provide some barometer of social wants and meeting them. Social insurance makes sense on many fronts, but social or state "planning" of economics has rotted state and worker. Kaufman's biological analogies explain why.

Postscript: Kaufman's book is a provocative, challenging, and fascinating (sometime heady) read. Even if all of his hypotheses in the abstract are found to be untrue, at least he captures the reader's imagination, and asks the questions that most of us non-dogmatic Darwinians have raised for some time. In a time when the "easy" and "orthodox" are all too convenient for slipping under the rug, Kaufman's questions (and suggested answers) go the the very nexus of the difficulties. His suggested answers are at once perhaps too simple, on the other hand, perhaps too complex. What is refreshing, above all, is that he's not afraid to ask, and even less fearful of suggesting solutions. Thank gawd for the Sante Fe Institute, where brave and curious minds still ask questions.

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