At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman

[Ani Osiris]

Quote:This theory of life's origins is rooted in an unrepented holism, born not of mysticism, but of mathematical necessity. A critical diversity of molelular species is necessary for life to crystalize. Simpler systems simply do not achieve catalytic closure. Life emerged whole, not piecemeal, and has remained so. Thus, unlike the dominant nude RNA view of the origin of life, with its evolutionary just-so stories, we have a hope of explaining why living creatures seem to have a minimal complexity, why nothing simpler than the pleuronoma can be alive. (p.69)When I first read the book, I remember being almost stunned by how much sense it made, especially in terms of how it provided such a robust framework in which other concepts like natural selection took on tremendous explanatory power in a (finally) satisfying and intuitive manner - in Kauffman's imagey, they found a comfortable home.The business about autocatalytic sets, central to Kauffman's ideas of course, were one of the things that really fascinated and the way they generate spontaneous order.PS: Sorries for the delay in this post... just noticed that it didn't take the first time I posted it.

[Jeremy1952]

The Science Book club sent Kauffman, The Origin of Order, to me by mistake. They said "just keep it", and it lay unopened on my shelf for the best part of a year. I ran out of reading material and decided to give it a shot. The Origin of Order is a deeply technical book, written for mathematicians or graduate students in math, and I almost gave up before I got to the "meat" of it. My reaction to "Order" was similar to your reaction to "At Home": Yes, yes, yes, someone has figured it out! And this, in spite of the fact that I understood maybe 20% of the book. Anyway, I don't know what everyone's level of education or interest is; for those who may want to tackle the primary research that "At Home" is based upon, "Origin" is your book.

[Ani Osiris]

Yeah, I've been meaning to read The Origin of Order ever since I read At Home... but I keep getting distracted by all the different developments in complexity theory and the many directions it goes in. Then Kuaffman goes and publishes another book (Investigations) where he proposes a 4th of Law of Thermodynamics. Basically, my reading list is heavy under the Red Queen effect

[Jeremy1952]

I'm about half-way through "At Home" and still excited by it. The approach reminds me in principle of the clarity that Dawkins brought to evolutionary theory with the concept of the extended phenotype and selfish gene. Of course genes do what they do and bodies do what they do, and factual observations about organisms are not affected at all by the concepts we use to understand them. Dawkins gave us evolution from the point of view of the gene. What Kauffman is doing is giving us evolution from the point of view of the molecule. Just as there is no contradiction between extended phenotype and Darwinian selection, there is no contradiction between rules of molecular interaction and the biology of genes and selection. What Kauffman is attempting to ascertain and explain are statistical rules of chemical interaction that are the raw materials used by biological evolution to make, well, us.It is the best kind of mind-bending to think of earth's biosphere in terms of the total number of reactive organic molecules; the likelihood of interaction and/or catalysis; the rules of molecular interaction that have generated webs of self-catalyzing systems, and the methods life uses to limit the number of interactions. Will a parasite ever evolve which presents an antigen for which our immune system cannot make an antibody? One of the results of Kauffman's work is the expectation that such an event is very nearly impossible. Our immune system can generate about 100 trillion different antibodies. When you start to calculate the number of different ways that amino acids can be assembled into strings, it looks like the number is orders of magnitude larger. However, one of the important principles that Kauffman has discovered is that completely different peptides (strings of amino acids) will act functionally the same as one another. The net effect is that there are only approximately 100 trillion possible different functional antigen shapes