Investigations

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Summary: Life in a Complex Universe
Review: "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.

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Summary: To be fair I'm only half way through the book...
Review: ...but someone needs to define some rules for writing such books...in this particular case he should start off explaining exactly WHY he wrote this book at this particular time and what point he is aiming to make...so far he seems wrapped up in defining life as "automonous agents" capable of doing work...he spends a couple of chapters on needlessly complex explanations of aspects of thermodynamics...maybe he'll achieve a coherent point in the second half of the book but somehow I doubt it...where are editors when you need them?

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Summary: Heady and Profound
Review: A heady and profound investigation of the definition of life by one of today's most influential and provocative scientists. Kauffman, a founding member of the prestigious and influential Santa Fe Institute, argues that complexity leads to "order for free," and that "self-organization mingles with natural selection in barely understood ways to yield the magnificence of our teeming biosphere. We must, therefore, expand evolutionary theory." If that last statement didn't exactly reveal the limits of your mind, reading Investigations may reward you with a bevy of fascinating ideas and insights into the nature of life. And though the non-scientist may find certain passages almost comically obtuse, each chapter is introduced and summarized in language any reader can understand -- and apply to a deeper understanding of the world around them.

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Summary: Object-oriented programing and diversity in the Econosphere
Review: As a computer scientist in the 60s through the 70s-80s, a small business owner in the 90s, and now a doctoral candidate in management, I found Kauffman's investigations to be intriging. Admittedly, I did not have adequate background to fully comprehend many of his arguments. However, the brief section that built a metaphor for comparing object-oriented systems design to benefits of diversity in the econosphere, caught my attention.

By making the comparison of program objects within a book focused more or less on autocatalytic biological systems, Kauffman may have touched on a potential paradigm for business management that could replace our reliance on the American management model of Frederick Taylor, Henri Feyol, and others. Small businesses are interacting on the Internet much like the organisms that Kaufmann discusses. Moreover, the divesty of interaction is now doubt increasing.

Kaufmann has provided some valuable theory to buttress the efforts of us less experience thinkers and is to be respected. He may 'wander' and he may be a 'reacher for the great theory', but along the way he is providing some much needed, provocative theoretical structure.

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Summary: Kauffman's Attempt to Explain Life Thermodynamically
Review: 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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Summary: A rugged read of a book
Review: 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.

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Summary: A thorough disappointment...
Review: I have greatly looked forward to Kauffman's new book when I ordered it. I have previously read and enjoyed his book, "At Home in The Universe."

Unfortunately, I wouldn't recommend "Investigations." I thik the book can be best described as a patchwork of rambling arguments, sometime quite paiful to follow and usually leading to very hesitatant conclusions that - more often than not - package what an interested reader already knows into different terminology.

The content of the book gravitates about several related concepts, most notably Kauffman's proposed definition of life, the concept of "general biology," and the fourth law of thermodynamics. In between the lines, I get the impression that Kauffman's main mission with this work is to build his name into the history of science with something big and new.

The result is a lot of repetition from his previous books plus a poorly articulated glimpse into the author's intuition about things to come. Barely readable for the most part.

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Summary: A "Must Read" for those of us who wonder.
Review: 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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Summary: Interesting ideas but get this man a decent editor
Review: 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.

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Summary: Confusion is Part of the Solution
Review: 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."