Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

The argument of this book is very interesting: complex systems spontaneously exhibit order; life may be the inevitable result of complexity and not a mere chance occurrence in the vastness of space. Other reviewers have summarized this stuff nicely.

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 am always happy when I finish a book. The first reason could be that the book was good, and it left somewhat smarter than before. The other case is because the book was not so good and I am happy no to read it any longer. Unfortunately, this book belongs to the second category. Unfortunately, really, because the subject and the hypothesis developped in "At Home In The Universe" definitly deserve a better treatment.

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.

An interesting book: full of ideas and new concepts, but curiously unmotivated. Kauffman's POV is that natural selection is insufficient to explain the diversity and complexity of life, and, therefore, some new laws have to be invoked. However, he fails to prove his claims. As an unabashed selectionist, I find them unconvincing (in fact, most of them boil down to a simple statement that "selection is not enough"). That, in itself, does not prove him wrong: for all I know his ideas are exactly right; he simply fails the scientific parsimony test. If natural selection is enough (a POV that I happen to hold), then, certainly, natural selection plus some laws of complexity will be sufficient. Abiogenesis is the only case where some application of self-organization seems to be necessary.

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).

When I read this book back in 1995, it was as though Stuart Kauffman was perfectly articulating the notions I had long held about self-organization and emergent order as key components in evolution, and something that was missing from Darwin's theory that natural selection and random mutation were the sole drivers of evolution.

It just seemed so obvious that I thought the scientific community would adopt this as self-evident soon after the book was published, in the same manner as Darwin's "Origin of Species" had on the world soon after it was published in 1859.

Yet it seems that Darwinian evolution through mere random mutation and selection continues to be accepted as the only means, whereby the incredible landscape of successful life forms that exist on the earth today, are the only accepted possibilities.

This is a very entrenched theory, but it is incomplete.

Kauffman explains how and why emergent order and self-organization are the natural outcomes of complex systems, and he does it very compellingly.

So much so that I am amazed that Darwin's narrow concept of random mutation and selection as the sole implements of evolution are still accepted by the scientific community as sufficient to explain the astonishing increase in complexity of living things on earth, despite numerous mass extinction that drove life of earth to the very brink of complete extinction.

This particular book is a fantastic revelation and study of the boundary between order and chaos as it applies to the evolution of life, culture, technology and anything else in the universe. Its goal is to seek a universal law regarding the emergence of order in what we've traditionally considered unordered or random sets of fundamental stuff. For example, one of the observations that it makes is that evolution as Darwin revealed it is by itself not a sufficient explanation (scientifically) for why and how creatures like us could be here at all. In other words, natural selection is not sufficient to accomplish what life has accomplished in this world of ours. It needed the help of a very important other "force"... the life force, I might call it, and to which I've alluded many times in many forms through my writings. It's that special something about the nature of the universe that brings about the cooperation of systems, the autocatalytic closure which makes "hanging together" and "existing" some sort of "goal" deeply encoded in the nature of it all. You might be able to see how I might identify these ideas very closely with that term "lifetoward". What goal-oriented force brought life to be and continues to make life strive for ever more order and complexity? This book answers I think very well with: it's not a force, per se, but rather a fundamental aspect of the basic nature of the universe. To quote the book, "We the expected." We as living beings belong here and are an integral part of an incredibly awe inspiring process of creation of meaning and order in a world aching to give birth to it. The book closes with a nice summary, which much like a message I had posted to the lifetoward@yahoogroups.com list some time ago, extols the development of a new and enlightened faith, based on a realization of the wonder of the way the universe deeply is and how we are in it.

In terms of the meaning and importance of this book, I would recommend it to everyone. However, I will warn you that it may be a significant challenge to read. It calls on a deeply considered understanding of a variety of disciplines, including most notably evolutionary biology, organic chemistry, mathematics, anthropology, and economics. It proceeds with an assumption that the reader has realized or can quickly recognize the common ground between these different areas of study. It uses a lot of mathematical models and visualizations of 2, 3 and hyperdimensional spaces to discuss the nature of this common law and its emergence in the world around us.

Kauffman is a complexity theorist/mathematical biologist. The most intriguing concept in this book is that of an autocatalytic set: put enough kinds of organic molecules, which possibly could be developed by non-organic means, in a self contained space, which can arise in various ways, and a system with the properties of life will emerge with reasonable probability. This is just one example of a self-organizing system. Another important idea is the importance of the boundary between sub-critical and super-critical regions of a dynamic system: if super-critical there is chaotic change, if sub-critical there may not be enough flexibility to adapt. Organisms have evolved so mutation rates lay near the boundary, but still in the sub-critical area, and it is characteristic of successful ecosystems. There is an explanation of why it is natural and logical that all the current phyla, and many more extinct ones, arose in the Cambrian period or "immediately" after, even though in the subsequent Permian extinction, for example, 96% of species became extinct, to be replaced by new ones. While sometimes repetitious, Kaufman's prose would often do a novelist proud, and he is excellent in explaining abstract concepts, using images and graphs to good effect. He is particularly good at explaining the work of others. He has a very likable personality and is great in giving credit to others, eminent scientists as well as Emily Dickinson (a computer scientist who worked for him). Why then did I not like this book even more than I did? A major problem for me is that Kauffman's passion is for the logic, not the biology, and I would have appreciated additional fleshing out of his models in their biological context. His application of his models to other areas such as technology are sometimes interesting, but not always; sometimes, what he thinks is a new insight is hardly new at all: cf. his discussion of the use of a set of sub-optimizations to solve one large optimization problem. Finally, I found his discussion of ontogeny very confusing: recalling his image, I understood that there were a number of sub-systems of flashing green lights of varying size(corresponding to cell types), so how does the total number of green lights relates to the time for cell division?

This book is written from a biological perspective, which is not where my interests lie. Perhaps if my background were different, I would have given it an additional star.

The greatest benefit I received from this book was exposure to a whole new subject area (self organization). After reading the book, I moved on to read several other books about emergent behaviour which is more along the lines of my interests.

It served me well to open my eyes to a different way of thinking. The other books I have read have served me better as they are not primarily biologically based.

Kauffman's book provides a clear description of self-organizing systems, the emergence of life, fitness landscapes, and evolution. It is written for the well-educated layperson, but if you want to see some of the associated math, refer to Kauffman's other book, or simply google e.g. "NK-landscape". I highly recommend this book. And if you like this book, see also Rare Earth and Chaisson's Cosmic Evolution.

This book takes a hard look at how life on earth came to be. Rather than buy into the idea that somehow life evolved via the "blind watchmaker" scenario (i.e., similar to the argument that an army of monkeys sitting at typewriters would eventually compose a great novel), Stuart Kauffman builds a terrific case that the ingredients essential to life are bound to the rules that govern complex adaptive systems. And the very presence of these rules send a strong signal that "we the living", are "we the intended."

The author's conviction to both his argument and the science of complex systems is evident throughout the book. If you are coming to this book without much background in complex adaptive systems, you will not be short-changed here. In fact, Kauffman provides extremely rich examples with numerous simple diagrams to educate the reader as he builds his case. Considering the book was published some 7 years ago, I was surprised to see the concept of gene networks given so much attention in the text. Seeing how the latest trend in genomics research is looking at genes and proteins as a regulatory network and attempting to identify specific disease pathways, the science in this book is extremely relevant.

I will not attempt to summarize "At Home" since many other highly rated Amazon reviews have already done so. My main purpose is to offer some additional comments and to add a five star rating.

I don't know how completely and totally original Kauffman's ideas are since I am not actively involved in the research areas Kauffman addresses. I do know that he gives effusive credit to many other individuals. And I'm not sure debating the issue of proper and exhaustive attribution, like some prior reviews have done, has much to do with the intriguing and revolutionary ideas Kauffman presents. However, for what it's worth, I suspect that many of the ideas are his own. If not in their entirety, at least in the novelty of their application. I am a popular science junkie and numerous ideas, or at least the way they were discussed, were new and exciting to me. I think they will be to many others readers as well. I say this after having read several other newer, related books. In fact, I plan to read Kauffman's older and more technical book, "Origins of Order", rather than reading more recent but lighter fare from other authors.

I was not bothered by Kauffman's enthusiasm or his grandiloquence, as one reviewer put it. Rather, I found his enthusiasm infectious, rewarding, and most of all, legitimate. For example, when Kauffman says to the reader, "Your antennae should be twitching", I found the comment to be both amusing and rewarding. My guess is that Kauffman will make your antennae twitch too. The ideas he presents are revolutionary and may even change your worldview. They have mine.

They also touch on the spiritual. An image that sticks in my mind, although I don't remember the source, is of a huge old oak tree surrounded by layers of dead leaves. As we approach the time when we will be one of those dead leaves we may take comfort in the fact that we were instrumental in maintaining the life of the magnificent tree, if even for a short while and in a small way. Kauffman offers a scientific justification for such a view. A justification, I might add, that I find consistent with certain Buddhist notions. And, an apt justification for the book's title.