The author's goal in this book [1] is to convince the reader that the widely held opinion that life on earth (or anywhere else) is the product of a whole string of incredibly improbable chemical (and higher level) events is incredibly wrong. Being a professional biologist, Kauffman writes with authority, and is explicitly aware that he is preaching against the mainstream. For example, Ernst Mayr, the ‘grand old man’ of American biology, writes in a recent book [2] "... each step leading to the evolution of intelligent life on earth was highly improbable and [...] the evolution of the human species was the result of a sequence of thousands of these highly improbable steps. It is a miracle that man ever happened, and it would be an even greater miracle if such a sequence of improbabilities had been repeated anywhere else".
However, rather than wage a war of words, Kauffman presents the thought-provoking results of a series of ‘Monte-Carlo’ - like experiments (i.e. computer simulations). The first of these goes like this: Imagine that you have ten thousand buttons spread around on the floor. Begin now to pick up two buttons at random and tie them together loosely with a piece of thread. At first, every button you pick up will be ‘unthreaded’, but after a while (i.e. when 50% of the buttons have been threaded), every time you pick two buttons up, you in fact pick up several. In very short time, all the buttons are suddenly connected together in one large mat.
The interpretation to be placed on this example is that the individual threadings of button (-clump) pairs represent (reversible) chemical interactions between the two entities. Kauffman's point is that even quite random and low-probability interactions must "inevitably" and with surprisingly high probability play together to form "systems" when certain very general prerequisites are met. Of course, the button example alone cannot bear this argument, but it is typical of the kinds of experiments (i.e. computer simulations) that Kauffman and his students and colleagues have carried out over the years, and which he describes in reasonable detail. The result of all of his considerations - there are many angles, and I learned a lot - is that, even given one-in-a-trillion probabilities of interaction, only a few hundred distinct reactants will inevitably form a stable and evolutionarily likely entity. From this follows the conclusion that life is not at all incredibly unlikely, but, rather, "expected": we are "At Home in the Universe".
From about the 60% mark, Kauffman begins increasingly to apply his results to other than biological systems - economies, technological development - building on the fact that his experiments never specify what the interacting entities actually are. This part of the book is also concerned more with the connection to chaos theory and the additional point that "systems" must ‘live’ somewhere between true chaos and stultifying stasis, a point of view endemic at the Santa Fe Institute, with which Kauffman is closely associated.
Of complaints I have two: the first several (crucial) examples are explained both via a figure and via text. Unfortunately, the two versions don't use the same terminology, and are in several cases actually slightly different. It's as though the figures were first, but then remained un-updated as the text evolved. This is very frustrating when one is really trying to understand what the author is trying to communicate. My other complaint is that, while Kauffman's arguments are fine and the systems get built up (etc.), there is no attempt to get at the structure of the structures, that is, their hierarchical component: one indirect reference to Eigen and Schuster's work, for example, is too little, in my opinion, when one wishes to cast one's net so broadly.
All in all, I found Kauffman's argument generally convincing, and hope that the biological community will give it a fair hearing. Readers of this journal will presumably find it of great interest, whichever side of the various dichotomies they happen to inhabit. This is one of those books that may well become a classic.
References
1. Kauffman, Stewart. "At Home in the Universe - The Search of the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity". Oxford University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-19-509599-5 (alkaline paper, hardbound).
2. Mayr, Ernst. "Toward a New Philosophy of Biology - Observations of an Evolutionist". Harvard University Press, 1988. ISBN 0-674-89665-3 (alkaline paper, clothbound); 0-674-89666-1 (paperback).
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