At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity [Paperback]

But let me complain: this book is poorly written. Kauffman is drunk with complexity. Every single sentence seems crafted to convey just how weighty this business is. Sentences are overelaborate, examples are chocked with irrelevant details, technical terms are used when they could be left out...and he keeps saying things like "The marvelously simple result is this..." or "A little simple algebra reveals the very easy conclusion that...". The need to call things simple should warn the writer that he has not made things simple at all.

Apparently, Kauffman is the leading theorist in this area. No doubt his work is interesting to a broad audience. But this effort at simplifying complexity theory for a broad audience just fails. Surely there is a better guide to this terrain.

I was brought to this book by the excellent "Here Be Dragons" (by S. Levay and D. Koerner ), which had a complete chapter on self-organization theories and the origins of life. Based on this captivating first glimpse into the world of artificial life experiments, I decided that the book by Kauffman was worth a try. Well...

First, the good news: the book does explain all the generalities and details on self-organization and the possible applications, from the origins of life to economics and politics. The ideas are very innovative, and even if those theories may not correctly explain everything (a possibility wisely pointed out by the author), they do add something new and worth exploring. The chapters on autocatalytic chemical sets are the most interesting, and convinced me that luck and Darwinian evolution do not completely explain why life exists, and how it achieved such a complexity.

Now, the bad news. The writing style is a killer: egocentric, prophetic, repetitive, grandiloquent and lyrical. Egocentric, because the author keeps on talking at the first person, which is annoying and useless. Prophetic, because the author believes too much in the ultimate success of his own theories. Repetitive because having ten or more paragraphs in a row explaining the exact same thing again and again cannot be qualified differently. Grandiloquent and lyrical can be good when Sagan does it, but most of the time it's just clumsy. With this book, you will go even lower: ridicule.

Conclusion: 3 stars: 4 stars for the ideas and 1 star for the style. The subject deserves a better treatment. So, if someone knows of another book on the subject, please, contact me.

Another problem I've found with the book is a seeming lack of background research. While quite a goodly part of the book deals with the idea of fitness landscapes, the name of Sewall Wright--the person responsible for the original concept--is not mentioned. The bibliography is curiously devoid of most of the evolutionary biologists: Gould and Dawkins are mentioned, but Mayr, Maynard Smith, Haldane, and many others aren't. I am not talking about an appeal to authority here, but it seems to me that Kauffman should have spent more time dealing and, possibly, refuting the actual selectionist ideas, rather than setting up and destroying straw men. Dennett's cogent arguments from Darwin's Dangerous Idea are not dealt with at all...

All in all, I found the book quite interesting, despite the everpresent paeans to complexity and self-organization, but, ultimately, quite unconvincing. His previous work, The Origins of Order, claimed far less and was far more interesting (although more difficult).