Investigations (Hardcover)

by Stuart A. Kauffman (Author) "LECTURING in Dublin, one of the twentieth century's most famous physicists set the stage of contemporary biology during the war-heavy year of 1944..." (more)
Key Phrases: survivable regime, bromine fog, coevolving autonomous agents, Lego World, Lee Smolin, Santa Fe Institute (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
How can you tell when a scientific theory is revolutionary?

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

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

One of Kauffman's key concepts is that of the adjacent possible. Imagine a set of things that exist 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

From Scientific American
Kauffman's investigations concern nothing less than the nature of life. "It may be," he says, "that I have stumbled upon the proper definition of life itself." His deep and challenging argument runs as follows. Much of the order in living organisms is self-organized and spontaneous. "Self-organization mingles with natural selection in barely understood ways to yield the magnificence of our teeming biosphere. We must, therefore, expand evolutionary theory." The living organism, be it bacterial cell or human being, is a " 'propagating organization,' that is, that it literally constructs more of itself." This activity "has no statement in current physics or biology but constitutes that which constructs a bio- sphere." Kauffman, a founding member of the Santa Fe Institute, calls his actors autonomous agents and says we are on the verge of the capacity to create novel molecular autonomous agents. "When we do, or if we discover life on other planets and solar systems, science will enter a vast new phase in which we will create a 'general biology,' freed from the limitations of terrestrial biology."

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 302 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (October 26, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 019512104X
• ISBN-13: 978-0195121049
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #673,853 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

75 of 78 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A strong buy for anyone with a science background, December 19, 2000

By	decomplexity (Rutland, UK) - See all my reviews

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.

58 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but ultimately only shows our ignorance..., February 8, 2001

By	Yuri Kuzyk "zentao" (Toronto, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews

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.

39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A rugged read of a book, December 15, 2000

By	David Weaver (Vancouver, BC Canada) - See all my reviews

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.