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Investigations

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In the tradition of Schrödinger's classic What Is Life?, this book is a tour-de-force investigation of the basis of life itself, with conclusions that radically undermine the scientific approaches on which modern science rests-the approaches of Newton, Boltzman, Bohr, and Einstein.
Kauffman's At Home in the Universe, which The New York Times Book Review called "passionately written" and nature named "courageous," introduced pivotal ideas about order and evolution in complex life systems. In investigations, Kauffman builds on these theories and finds that classical science does not take into account that physical systems--such as people in a biosphere--effect their dynamic environments in addition to being affected by them. These systems act on their own behalf as autonomous agents, but what defines them as such? In other words, what is life? By defining and explaining autonomous agents and work in the contexts of thermodynamics and of information theory, Kauffman supplies a novel answer to this age-old question that goes beyond traditional scientific thinking.
Much of Investigations unpacks the progressively surprising implications of his definition. Kauffman lays out a foundation for a new concept of organization, and explores the requirements for the emergence of a general biology that will transcend terrestrial biology to seek laws governing biospheres anywhere in the cosmos. Moreover, he presents four candidate laws to explain how autonomous agents co-create their biosphere and the startling idea of a "co-creating" cosmos.
A showcase of Kauffman's most fundamental and significant ideas, Investigations presents a new way of thinking about the basics of general biology that will change the way we understand life itself--on this planet and anywhere else in the cosmos.

308 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

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About the author

Stuart A. Kauffman

16 books184 followers
Stuart Alan Kauffman (28 September 1939) is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher concerning the origin of life on Earth. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as well as for applying models of Boolean networks to simplified genetic circuits.

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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
Profile Image for Jonathan Hockey.
Author 2 books24 followers
June 17, 2020
Develops a very interesting and novel approach to defining life in a way more general than the specific life as we know it on earth. I agree with some aspects of his definition of life as agents completing a work cycle. I feel this gets to the core of something very important and common to what all life does in nature, in society, in economies and in biospheres. And it takes us beyond more earth/DNA-centric views of life solely as about replicating selfish genes or something of this kind that a Dawkins might choose to emphasise. Bringing the notion of autonomous agency to the heart of what life is, is a bold move, and may turn out to be fruitful in ultimately distinguishing living beings from machines. And I think making this latter distinction could actually be critical to the future of human civilisation, because with the path we have been going of mechanisation and technology taking over so many things, there is a big question raised about where human identity will find its place in this global network, and where and in what ways it will still be able to thrive.

A lot of what he does in this book goes more into the technical details of applying his approach to biological science. But, for me, the more interesting area would be to develop and contrast this conceptual approach to the phenomena of life with the more standard mainstream view of life portrayed in popular science and culture through figures such as Dawkins.
Profile Image for g BRETT.
80 reviews17 followers
April 11, 2017
I first read this fantastic book when it first came out back in 2000/2001. Have added it back on the to-read pile after reading Steven Johnson's latest, which calls on quite a bit from Investigations.
1 review
November 29, 2013
Extremely interesting, thought provoking and innovative scientific thinking, but very repetitive. Three stars rating is not due to the quality of the content but the repetitive nature of the book.
41 reviews
November 9, 2024
Questo è un libro bellissimo, come tutti i libri di scienza e sulla scienza dovrebbero essere. C’è un tripudio di sapere, di contaminazione con altre discipline, di amore per la conoscenza e curiosità infinita. Si spazia dalla biologia alla fisica, alla matematica e all’informatica, fino all’economia e alla storia. Tutte queste considerazioni non son buttate a caso, ma anzi vengono citati importanti studî dei relativi campi —il teorema «Non esistono pranzi gratuiti» di Macready e Wolpert, i teoremi di Kolmogorov della complessità computazionale, il teorema di Carnot in termodinamica, e tanti altri—. Lungi dall’essere un tuttologo, l’autore abbraccia i piú disparati campi del sapere per arricchire il suo discorso con importati contributi, nello spirito che la conoscenza vera sia olistica.

Kauffman apre le porte al lettore non esperto di quell’affascinante branca della scienza che è la teoria della complessità. Dimostra, con un filo di argomenti elementari e atomici, importanti studî su come si possano creare macchine biologiche autocatalitiche, in cui proteine si sintetizzano a vicenda, e con semplici argomenti combinatorî espone come il numero di possibili paesaggi in cui la vita si può evolvere è troppo grande per essere determinata in modo finito, anche da un «calcolatore cosmico», e di come la vita cerchi l’organizzazione autoconsistente esplorando questo paesaggio transfinito a un velocità abbastanza elevata per supportare l’evoluzione, ma non troppo da avere troppe mutazione dannose e collassare. Proprio come anche il genio di Schrödinger aveva capito e scritto nel suo libello Che cos’è la vita ormai quasi ottant’anni fa. Nelle parole di Kauffman, la vita «esplora il possibile adiacente —il paesaggio dell’evoluzione distante poche mutazioni nel futuro dall’istante considerato— e lo fa nella regione subcritica ma vicino al confine della criticità», cioè quella regione dove le mutazioni sono cosí elevate che causerebbero il collasso di un ecosistema e l’estinzione delle specie viventi al suo interno.

Kauffmann prova quindi a trovare una risposta alla domanda «che cos’è la vita?» studiando i sistemi complessi, prendendo in prestito conoscenze da tutto lo scibile, senza avere un approccio riduzionista e limitato, e cerca di trovare una «quarta legge della termodinamica» che possa fare da base a una spiegazione olistica (nel senso di totale) della vita. Propone tante alternative, e riconoscendo le sue mancanze e l’approccio manchevole (l’autore vede queste esplorazioni come «protoscienza»), ma tutte hanno in comune un tema: l’organizzazione, che la vita e la non vita non ha. Un concetto bellissimo e, per un non addetto ai lavori come me, rivoluzionario.

A distanza di quasi venticinque anni dalla sua prima pubblicazione, le idee contenute in Esplorazioni evolutive emanano ancora una freschezza rara, tipica però dei grandi scienziati che dedicano tutta la loro vita e tutta la loro forza mentale a cercare di scoprire i misteri che ci circondano. Magari alcuni concetti ormai sono superati o decretati come sbagliati, e magari vi potrà sembrare un po’ troppo convinto delle proprie tesi durante certi passi della lettura; e l’autore non sempre è stato chiarissimo nell’esporre concetti anche abbastanza semplici (di certo la traduzione non ha aiutato, cosí piena d’anglismi e scelte lessicali o grafematiche discutibili). Ma se sarete pronti a considerarle, le idee di Kauffman vi lasceranno stupiti per la loro bellezza e armonica, e la curiosità di leggere di piú s’impossesserà di voi. E questo è ciò che fa grande un libro, soprattutto un libro di scienza.
Profile Image for Denis Romanovsky.
215 reviews
February 1, 2023
This book was quite hard for me as I do not have background it physics. Still, very interesting how the author combined concepts of complexity science with modern physics theories.

There are many interesting and still actual topics like emergence, raise of complexity from small incremental changes, life as a self-organizing process, role of symmetry breaking, role of niches in evolution, and that economy is similar to biological systems.
2 reviews
November 3, 2023
I am a Stuart Kauffman fan. I love his writing. This is a really good book that combines his contributions to science, if you had to pick just a few of them. I read science books all the time and when I hit a subject in their book, that seems to point to mystery ( e.i. how life began, chemical reactions, etc), I wonder; "Why don't they just read Mr Kauffman's books. Silly scientist! "

He has science, facts, testing and a bit of spirituality, in a cosmic wonder kind of way.
My favorite is the autonomous agent chapter. I can no longer ready any subject on emergence without going back to this concept of an autonomous agent. Enjoy!
3 reviews
January 7, 2025
A bustling—one might say “bloated”—menagerie of misfit ideas. Heavily recycled from prior books in the author’s catalog (“The Origins of Order” and “At Home in the Universe”) and indebted, with due credit, to superior entries in the complex systems literature. Compare, for example, the drive-by critique of the “Newtonian paradigm” in this book, and the much richer and more lucid volley by Robert Rosen in “Life Itself”.

The language can often be treacly and tiresome. Lacking as it is in organization, supposedly echoing the presentation in Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations”, the book has an unfinished quality that can nevertheless be tolerated in light of its many, if fleeting, stimulations.
Profile Image for Satai.
11 reviews41 followers
June 24, 2013
Nektere kusy, obzvlaste u konce jsou copy-paste z jinych mist. Nebo se to tomu alespon podoba.

Na druhou stranu zakladni otazka je pomerne nosna a pristup k reseni ne zcela trivialni. Kauffman asi globalne pravdu nema, ale za zamysleni stoji. Nektere kusy (autokatalyticke site) bych mel rad vykousle vedle do hutneho a kompaktniho textu, protoze jsou to dobre, testovatelne a asi i celkem pravdive hypotezy.
Profile Image for Ushan.
801 reviews77 followers
December 24, 2010
Kauffman believes that as a mixture of organic chemicals grows ever more complex, it undergoes a phase transition and produces a self-replicator, which is to say, life. Of course, no one has been able to demonstrate it before or since.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews

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