Customer Reviews

Investigations

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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. 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.

Ah...complexity. Once the golden-haired child of science it has, these days, sort of wandered down a path similar to AI. That is, although the field has produced a number of interesting developments it has ultimately failed to deliver anything really deep.

Investigations starts with a lot of promise, similar to Capra's "Web of Life" with Kauffman demonstrating both his knowledge of the complexity of genetics and some good writing skills. In fact, I learned quite a bit reading the first 4 chapters although I suspect that readers expecting something similar to Gleick's "Chaos" will have their eyes glaze over when they hit the more detailed sections of genetic complexity.

However, as Kauffman continues I found the same old story as Capra fell victim to: no meat to the math. What do I mean? Well, if one looks at the equations for something like quantum theory there is much information they impart to give hints about "why". Complexity has produced equations but they don't seem to have any depth - they may describe some phenomenom but don't give any deeper knowledge about it.

In other words, I don't really get excited about another thermodynamic "law" since that is simply sweeping our ignorance under the proverbial carpet by taking an observation as an axiom. In fact the final chapters, in which Kaufmann tries to tie quantum theory (and string theory) to his thesis, really made me wonder if he just wanted to get this book out before Wolfram's opus.

I suspect Kauffman should have spent some time talking to Ilya Prigogine since any theory trying to explain why things go in one direction (entropy) yet also seem to get more complicated obviously needs to incorporate time. Given that time is an "illusion" (in the grand words of Hawking) if one looks at current physics theories then we still have some distance to go. Prigogine's work in attempting to incorporate time into quantum theory gives a first step forward and Kauffman's theory could build on that.

Not only is the subject matter towards the end of the book very sketchy but so is the language used. On one page alone there are 4 paragraphs in sequence with the same words! I understand repetetive structure can emphasize a point but come on, this is a bit too much to satisfy my grade 8 English teacher! Add in the very short "reference" section - Kauffman mentions names but no works appear in the section - and a rather thin index and I suspect he just wanted to get this book out quickly.

Borrow it from the library (I doubt there will be a softcover) if you must but I wouldn't bother spending the cash.

I have followed the writings of Stuart Kauffman very closely since his first book 'Origins of Order'. The Santa Fe Institute with which he is associated is a wonderful think-tank of multi-disciplinary, but converging studies. Kauffman's contribution to this group has been huge.

I find that Kauffman's world view is compelling, resonant and deeply fascinating. This book contains the ideas within 'At Home in the Universe' and then extends them into the 'adjacent possible'.

Be prepared when reading this book to be taxed on your knowledge of cell chemistry, mathematics, thermodynamics and evolution. The rapid jumps between disciplines are handy for explaining some rather obtuse ideas, but Kauffman may isolate many readers by diving in to unelaborated detail on the idiosyncracies of these subjects. Even a brief overview of some of the terms used in his metaphors would be a great help to those without PhDs.

Personally, I buy Kauffman's worldview hook, line and sinker which makes any of his writings a must-read for me, but I am convinced that the audience for this book was not carefully considered, and as a result it seems that it is written for himself primarily. It could do with a thorough edit removing the grandiose language.

Stu, I know you can do better.

"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.

Kauffman shares with us his grand, cosmic speculations. What is the essence of life itself? Why do we live in a world that contains problems we are uniquely prepared to solve? Why is the universe, in all its aspects, so much more complex, and alive, today than 4 billion years ago? Is there a fourth law of thermodynamics that explains this characteristic of the universe so plainly before us?

The science literate lay-person will struggle with this volume and will not understand at many points. However, the book is well worth the read. You will continue to "see through a glass darkly" but some of the shadows will be more recognizable and the terrain will become both more mysterious and more understandable.

With my background in Sociology, I cut my graduate teeth on arguments for and against emergence. I am delighted to see more concrete validation of this core concept. I also find pieces of Kauffman's argument captured in Amos Hawley's classic work, Human Ecology, in which he outlines the dynamics by which competition generates increased diversity in social systems. In the recent more popular work, Non Zero, by Wright which argues, with much less depth, the same basic premise of increasing complexity.

Kauffman makes me wish I were an under-graduate again, able to develop the mathematical, computer and theoretical science skills necessary to enter meaningfully into the dialog that he encourages. Lacking those skills, I still enjoy the opportunity, as an interested and intrigued bystander, to see a fine mind in operation. Kauffman pulls us into his thought processes as he contemplates the marvelous, generative universe of which we are a part.

Normally I'd dismiss out of hand anyone who claims to have found a fourth law of thermodynamics but from Stuart Kauffman, I'll hear what he has to say. I've been following Kauffman's work for years and his thinking is as engaging as ever. Unfortunately, his prose is not. Grandiose, clumsy and over-written, he sells his ideas short. The language is unreadably uneven as it ranges from patronising pop-sci gobbley-gook to technical minutaie of molecular biology.

Kauffman attempts to articulate something that he calls "general biology". This is simply a dressed-up term for the classic problem of the origin of life. Unfortunately, his explanation also follows the classic pop-sci strategy of explaining one mysterious thing (life) by replacing it with other equally mysterious concepts (work and semantics). In this part of the book, the writing is woefully repetitive and elliptic. No real conclusions are drawn, which is a a monumental let-down given the ego-maniacally overblown introduction. There is an intellectual abyss between Kauffman's definition of life as auto-catalytic systems with one work cycle, and real cells that undergo reproduction and darwinian evolution.

Nevertheless, there are many nuggets of gold in the later chapters. Probably the most interesting is the idea of the adjacent possible. The adjacent possible is the set of all possible chemicals that can be synthesized in one chemical step from all existing chemicals. Unlike other concepts introduced in the book, it is something that can be computed (though not exhaustively). Kauffman then proposes a fourth law of chemical thermodynamics: a chemical system advances into the adjacent-possible as fast as it can. Kauffman shows how this hypothetical fourth law can be analysed by relating this to his previous work on sustainable chemical diversity. Indeed, the best parts of the book are where Kauffman re-caps his previous work on auto-catalytic systems and genomes of real organisms, and then extends the analysis to explain his fourth law of thermodynamics.

Kauffman makes some neat analogies between the chemical adjacent-possible with economics. He points out that classical economic models of pricing rely on the assumption of a finite prestable collection of goods and services. Instead, a more fruitful model for an economy of products can be made in analogy to the ever-explanding set of catalytic chemicals. There is also a great analysis on the limits of the economy of scale where Kauffman makes a analogy between the Ksat problem and the problem of producing diverse products in a single factory. And finally, in the grand tradition of pop-sci books, there is a final chapter where all the problems of quantum mechanics and cosmology are solved with the application of one special idea. Although this last chapter is pure science fiction, the book is worth perservering as some of the ideas are original, useful and genuinely thought provoking.

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.

At one point in his Investigations Stuart Kauffman ponders who's genius is to be more coveted: Einstein's or Shakespeare's? This offhand reverie occurs in a wide-ranging, not entirely crafty work long on theory and short on natural history and facts. Its goal at times seems as much to dazzle and bamboozle us with his brilliance as to inform us. What is one to make of this man who, until his recent eclipse by Stephen Wolfram, has been the premier spokesman of complexity, courted by corporations and politicians, an apprentice jazz drummer with the ear of a handful of Nobel Prize winners, the chief and charming interdisciplinarian guru of the most exciting abstract think tank in the world, the Santa Fe Institute?

Although Kauffman may be buying into his own hype, and though this book in the end may not say much, one thing about it is very interesting: Kauffman argues-ultimately against the grain of complexity and chaos theory, and perhaps against science itself-that highly complex things may not be "finitely prestatable"-Newtonian equations may allow man to get to the moon, but they don't predict the shape and location of Neil Armstron's footprint! (Ironically, this whole book can be read as a prophylactic counterargument to Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, which appeared later.) I love the future, wrote Nietzsche, because it is unkown. Happily, this is true--but the price exacted by Kauffman as imperial tailor may be a bit high, considering the quality of the fabric in Emperor Technoscience's new suit of clothes.

Another theory advanced by Kauffman here is that the biosphere is racing "as fast as possible" into "the adjacent possible." He highlights the mathematical fact that elapsed time since the origin of the universe has been woefully inadequate to accomodate all possible comibinations of its constituent particles. The biosphere is, in mathematicians' terms, "non-ergoidic," i.e. non-repeating. This is important because thermodynamics-the study of energy and its transformations-has in modern times been based on the statistics of mixing. When your cream mixes with your coffee, they come to equilibrium: there are far more ways for the constituents to be mixed than separated. So in the forward flow of time the consituents naturally intermingle, and the temperature of the coffee equilibrates with that of the room. Such mixing was even thought by Boltzmann, a founder of statistical mechanics, to provide the direction of linear time. But Poincaré and others showed that the direction of increasing probability does not insure mixing. Over infinite time, even rare combinations would occur, and not once but an infinite number of times. Einstein and Gödel subsequently worked on trying to find a better reason for time's apparent one-way flow, but they failed. Indeed, even the equations of Einstein and Bohr and others-which underlie virtually all of modern science-are flawed in their assumption that we can state beforehand the environment we want to predict. We cannot just apply laws because evolution is too strong. Drawing (with some reservations) on the work of cosmologist and friend, Lee Smolin, who argues for a cosmic selection in which universal constants are born in black holes, Kauffman says what we call laws are not given but must occur over evolutionary time, like human legal codes. The regime of chromosomes and meiosis in cells, for example, operates as a law even though it apeared in time. A trilobite that jumped left, instead of right, and was devoured, took the genes of an entire lineage with her, never to be seen again. The first flying squirrel really just had ugly flaps of skin that came in handy when she jumped. Such evolutionary events, occuring as the cosmos (and with it life) head nonergodically into the "adjacent possible," cannot be finitely prestated, Kauffman tells us, over and again. As a philosophy, the adjacent possible is reminiscent of the viewpoint Kundera puts forward in The Incredible Lightness of Being. But there is a big problem with the science, especially Kauffman's hyper-ambitious attempt to derive a new, fourth law of thermodynamics. To the person with a hammer everything is apotential nail: to the complexity theorist, everything is similar to a program on a personal computer. Kauffman recognizes this weakness. His new would-be "constructivist" (rather than reductionist) science is implicitly a critique of algorithmic complexity itself, of the computation of outcomes based on initial conditions made so much easier by the PC. His Boolean algebraic explanation of how regulatory

There are simpler, better explanations of life's defiance of algorithmic complexity than a lawlike flight of life, the universe, and everything into the adjacent possible. First of all, if the universe were collapsing as fast as possible into the adjacent possible, becoming as complex as it can, it might be teeming with life rather than radiation and matter. Better than devising a new, fourth law (and then retrofitting it to the cosmos) is to extend the second law. It is crucial to remember that the 2nd law was originally stated for isolated systems rather than the open ones of life and the cosmos; that its original incarnation thus covered the special rather than the general case. This is why it must be extended, as indeed it has been in an anthology called What is Life: The Next Fifty Years, to which Kauffman contributed (!), by the thermodynamicist Eric D. Schneider. Dramatically contrasting with Kauffman's complex charts and explanations, Schneider elegantly writes that "nature abhors a gradient." A gradient, a difference across a distance, collapses naturally, giving rise to cycling complex systems without interference from human computer programmers. Examples of such natural complexity include tornados (the result of barometric pressure differences), hurricanes, convection cells, chemical autocatlytic reactions and life itself. The thermodynamics of the extended second law, applying neatly to biospheric complexity, derives from Vladimir Vernadsky, Alfred Lotka, Joseph Kestin, Keenan, Hatsopoulos, Harold Morowitz, and others. But, since they are not mentioned, one can only assume that Kauffman did not do his homework on the thermodynamics of life before trying to stamp his own name on the field.

Stuart Kauffman has been probing the "deep structure" of life for decades. He is one of the founding members of the Santa Fe Institute, the leading center for the emerging sciences of complexity. His work therein started in complex Boolean networks in which he found "order for free" in a void seeming to consist of nothing but chaos. This lead him to highly dynamical yet self-structuring autocatalytic sets (now known as "Kauffman sets") which eventually lead him to search for a general biology from which all of life could extrapolate. Kauffman never was much for neo-Darwinism or natural selection, and here he continues his holistic approach to self-organizing biospheres.

Investigations attempts, in part, to outline four candidate laws governing biospheres (large dynamical systems full of self-organizing autonomous agents - such as the universe itself). A lofty pursuit to be sure, givien that biospheres are teeming with so much complexity, interdependence and obscured initial states (to name just a few of the obvious pitfalls). There are also the problems, as Kauffman points out, that biospheres are "nonergodic" and their "nonequilibrium" flowing into a "persistent adjacent other."

Recondite minutia notwithstanding, Investigations is fun in a way not many books of this intellectual magnitude are. Kauffman cuts the hard science with wit and pondering of the utmost human persuasion. While he undermines the very foundations on which modern science stands (the work of Newton, Boltzman, Einstein and Bohr), Kauffman compares the geniuses of Shakespeare and Einstein ("I'm not sure whose genius is the more awesome, " he says.) and emphasizes the importance of story in understanding our lives in the universe.

With a healthy mix of speculation, cutting-edge science and hypothesis steeped in years of grappling with the hard questions, Stuart Kauffman's Investigations is sure to inspire and intrigue, as well as confound and confuse. As he says, "Oh, confusion. Perhaps a certain confusion is healthy. We have not tried to embrace all of this at once before."

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!