Investigations 1st Edition

by Stuart A. Kauffman (Author)

24 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0195121049

ISBN-10: 9780195121049

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"It may be that I have stumbled upon an adequate description of life itself."
These modest yet profound words trumpet an imminent paradigm shift in scientific, economic, and technological thinking. In the tradition of Schrödinger's classic What Is Life?, Kauffman's Investigations is a tour-de-force exploration of the very essence of life itself, with conclusions that radically undermine the scientific approaches on which modern science rests--the approaches of Newton, Boltzman, Bohr, and Einstein.
Building on his pivotal ideas about order and evolution in complex life systems, Kauffman 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? Kauffman supplies a novel answer that goes beyond traditional scientific thinking by defining and explaining autonomous agents and work in the contexts of thermodynamics and of information theory. Much of Investigations unpacks the progressively surprising implications of his definition. Significantly, he sets the stages for a technological revolution in the coming decades. Scientists and engineers may soon seek to create autonomous agents--both organic and mechanical--that can not only construct things and work, but also reproduce themselves! Kauffman also 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 fundamentals of general biology that will change the way we understand life itself--on this planet and anywhere else in the cosmos.

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."

EDITORS OF SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

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Product details

Hardcover: 302 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (October 26, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780195121049
ISBN-13: 978-0195121049
ASIN: 019512104X
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 1.1 x 6.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 24 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #368,987 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #252 in Biotechnology (Books)
- #1465 in Biology (Books)
- #376 in Scientific Research

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Intellectually daring

July 12, 2001

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

One of the most profound scientific books I have ever read...profound in its ambition to integrate results from so many (supposedly) distinct fields and weave them into a sort of grand unification theory of organizational dynamics.It is not laid out with the formality of a scientific paper or the rigor of a mathematical proof (and it doesn't claim to be), but the arguments are very coherent and compelling, based on equal parts "hard" empirical results and computer simulation. It is above all clear that this is a culmination of Kauffman's 30+ years of work and that of his many colleagues.One word of caution: If you're not comfortable with basic physics, thermodynamics, and some non-trivial mathematical concepts, many of Kauffman's metaphors might be lost on you. It also helps to have read his earlier works and those of authors in related lines of research (John Holland, Ilya Prigogine). He tries very hard to make this accessible to readers with basic scientific literacy, but this is NOT layman's reading.

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chung hsieh

Five Stars

August 27, 2015

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

excellent!

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Robert S. Powell

Five Stars

October 24, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I love it

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Robert Callan

Five Stars

December 18, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Updates Kauffman's previous work, and provides strong explanations.

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A. Panda

Strange brew of ideas: Chaotic but autocatalytic

February 5, 2010

Format: Paperback

According to the introduction, the author started writing his ideas about complexity in a notebook in order to understand the interrelationships in a better way; he also mentioned that he did not know if his "investigations" would be useful or absurd, but he thinks he has arrived at a "new theory". The book is virtually full of ideas written for the author himself; the concepts are mercilessly "thrown" at you without previous explanations, so be sure you have previous basic knowledge on the topics. I am not exaggerating when I say that this is among the 10 top-worst written books that I have read (in terms of writing style, not in terms of content), but the ideas are truly novel and amazing; I will surely return to them in the future.

Throughout the book Mr. Kauffman tries to establish the foundations of what he calls a "general biology", meaning the laws that would govern life and evolving biospheres everywhere in our universe or maybe even in any universe. In science as we know it, we assume we can determine the space of configurations beforehand, whereas the author claims that in complex systems like biospheres this is impossible due to its non-ergodic (non repeatable) nature.

The investigations try to answer fundamental questions like the "origin of life". Life most probably did not occur as a spontaneous "replication of molds", like the auto-copying mechanism of DNA, which only appeared later. Instead, he proposes that life emerged out of a collective autocatalytic system in which molecule A catalyzes the production of molecule B out of B's fragments and B catalyzes the production of A out of its fragments. Now imagine this autocatalytic system but conformed of hundreds of proteins and peptides; the ever increasing molecular complexity achieved by way of recombinations of the existing molecules gives way to life as an "emergent collective behavior of complex chemical networks". Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution explains some of the bio-chemical concepts in an easier way.

The question "what is life?" is approached by introducing autonomous agents, which are defined as "autocatalytic systems able to reproduce themselves and to perform one or more cycles of thermodynamic work", he also defines them as "a physical system able to act selfishly". Here you will find the explanation of Carnot's work cycle in which a full work cycle can be completed automatically by a simple machine by way of a controlled release of energy. Then the system returns to the initial state in order be able to start another cycle. Autonomous agents complete work cycles for their own benefit in different ways, but mainly by way of chemical reactions (e.g. metabolical reactions) that release energy to perform recurrent work cycles. For other equally astonishing definitions of life read Tree of Knowledge and Life Itself: Exploring the Realm of the Living Cell.

Mr. Kauffman explains "Maxwell's demon" to measure a system's small deviations from equilibrium (equivalent to obtaining information from the system to take advantage of this deviations and obtain energy to produce work), thereby relating "information" to "entropy reduction". In later chapters the author proposes a new thermodynamic law, which could also account for "the arrow of time" (for a good explanation of the arrow of time read Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity). This "new law" states that instead of tending to equilibrium and arriving at a state of maximal entropy, our biosphere and probably the entire universe tend to the adjacent possible as quickly as they can, breaking more symmetries each time and remaining in a non-equilibrium state from which energy can be obtained by coupled systems and autonomous agents to perform work in an endless loop of complex reactions and cycles. For better explanations of statistical physics, power laws and thermodynamic concepts read also Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another and Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics. This latter explains many of Mr. Kauffman's ideas - including evolution and co-evolution, adaptive surfaces, etc.- but in a clear, concise and well written manner. Chaos: Making a New Science is also a great introduction to the topic.

In some chapters the ideas seemed not fully formed and in my opinion are very close to speculation, specially the chapter where he tries to link Mr. Smolin's quantum gravity theories (alternative to the "superstring theory") with his idea of a fourth law of thermodynamics; not to mention a brief but completely unreadable appendix on consciousness (Spanish edition by Tusquets-Metatemas). I usually love when scientists get out of their area of knowledge and link concepts of other fields to their own expertise to form new hypothesis; but this time I think it went way too far.

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Bryan Long

A "Must Read" for those of us who wonder.

September 29, 2004

Format: Hardcover

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!

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Investigations 1st Edition