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Stuart A. Kauffman

Investigations

by Stuart A. Kauffman (Author)

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In the tradition of Schrödinger's classic What Is Life?, this book is a tour-de-force investigation of the basis of life itself, with conclusions that radically undermine the scientific approaches on which modern science rests-the approaches of Newton, Boltzman, Bohr, and Einstein.
Kauffman's At Home in the Universe, which The New York Times Book Review called "passionately written" and nature named "courageous," introduced pivotal ideas about order and evolution in complex life systems. In investigations, Kauffman builds on these theories and 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? By defining and explaining autonomous agents and work in the contexts of thermodynamics and of information theory, Kauffman supplies a novel answer to this age-old question that goes beyond traditional scientific thinking.
Much of Investigations unpacks the progressively surprising implications of his definition. Kauffman 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 basics of general biology that will change the way we understand life itself--on this planet and anywhere else in the cosmos.

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ISBN-10

0195121058
ISBN-13

978-0195121056
Publisher

Oxford University Press
Publication date

September 19, 2002
Language

English
Dimensions

8.94 x 6.04 x 0.77 inches
Print length

308 pages
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Stuart A. Kauffman
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Stephen Wolfram
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Stuart Kauffman
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Douglas R Hofstadter
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Editorial Reviews

Review

[REVIEW FOR AT HOME IN THE UNIVERSE:] "One of the pioneers of complexity theory is Stuart Kauffman, who lays out its rudiments in an accessible way with this challenging and audacious book."--The Economist

[REVIEW FOR AT HOME IN THE UNIVERSE:] "Kauffman's explanations of his scientific work are concise and convincing.... Whoever reads Invesigations (At Home in the Universe) for its account of Kauffman's insightful models of adaptation and self-organization will find that the scientific results speak for themselves."--Seth Lloyd, Scientific American

[REVIEW FOR AT HOME IN THE UNIVERSE:] "At home in the Universe is a condenmsed, passionately written version of Mr. Kauffman's 709-page magnum opus, The Origins of Order."--John Horgan, The New York Times Book Review

"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....With a mix of speculation, cutting-edge science and hypothesis steeped in years of grappling with hard questions,...[this book] is sure to inspire and intrigue."--Frontwheeldrive.com

"I have watched the long gestation of Investigations with some apprehension but more anticipation. Its reach is gigantic, from the most primitive origins of life to the macroeconomics of innovation. What comes up in its grasp is original and stimulating. This is a must read for anyone interested in the outer edges of understanding of the world around us."--Philip Anderson, Nobel Laureate, Princeton University

Book Description

A breakthrough in our understanding of life on this planet and throughout the universe

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press (September 19, 2002)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 308 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0195121058
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195121056
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.04 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.94 x 6.04 x 0.77 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,644,866 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,084 in Biotechnology (Books)
- #1,189 in Scientific Research
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ACCGTGGTGACA...

Intellectually daring

Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2001

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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.

8 people found this helpful

Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2016

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

Robert S. Powell

Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2016

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I love it

Strange brew of ideas: Chaotic but autocatalytic

Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2010

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.

2 people found this helpful

Reviewed in the United States on August 27, 2015

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excellent!

Kauffman's Attempt to Explain Life Thermodynamically

Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2002

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.

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Anna Maria V

Per chi è interessato alla complessità libro da non perdere

Reviewed in Italy on August 19, 2019

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Molto interessante

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Louis

Tedious work....

Reviewed in France on February 10, 2015

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S. Kauffman has proposed in the past some brilliant books (At Home in the Universe). This time however, he does not add much but only words to his own reflexion and refers almost only to his own work, including a strong bias to self satisfaction and auto promotion. The problem of the origin of life is somewhat lost to long, very long and unrelated digressions that are not easily connected with the subject. This book is way too long, quite boring to read and does not add much to his much better previous work...just one book too much?

Theflower1826

初めてのKINDLE本

Reviewed in Japan on June 17, 2015

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一般向けに書かれていると言ってもやはり科学用語が多いこの本、タブレットPCで読み出しましたがとにかく英語辞書機能が使いやすいのでなんとか読み進めています。なかなか頭に入らない用語もひきやすいので何度も例文などで確認してとても良い英語の勉強になっています。これで勉強すれば読む能力については飛躍的に良くなること請け合いです、ただし、興味がある内容であること。当然カウフマンの思考実験に直接触れられるのですから面白いこと保証付ですが。

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