Rating: 
Summary: We are living expected systems in this Selective Universe
Review: A human beeing as an expected system interconecting to all of it's subsystems and
brings them to a edge of caos state! Sounds
complicated Kauffman let's you know it's
the result of 4.5 Billion years of a selection,
that takes you between a critical and subcritical
state. We are a natural result, in a universe that
keeps selecting and devouring any system that isn't able to operate at that edge of caos state at this phase transition, shaped by the evolving capability
of all related agents, beings or/and innovations.
Our place in the universe seems to be rather
expected, we are the survivors of generations
and generations of interactions with our environment and ourselves. From the first
signs of complex life to our actual technological
society where our companies, institutions,
democracies keep also to reach their optimal
fitnees, finding out where is the best path
to evolve to. We are in a changing universe,
solar system, planet, ecosystem, society. We
need to change at their rythm to be survivals,
our self organized chemistry makes part of the
work, now our minds, ideas, concepts evolve
also doing the rest of the work. We will never
find a "desired home", because our real home
is change, evolution and innovation.
Our human race at the edge of Caos is at Home, this is what we do best and will keep doing
Rating:
Summary: Excellent new vision of evolution of life and society
Review: This book explores how life and its evolution may be the inevitable consequences of the way the universe works. The author uses recent explorations of computer models of complexity to uncover new ideas about the organization of systems. These ideas extend well beyond biology to application to social and market systems
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, thought provoking thoughts on order and evolution
Review: I wrote more notes in the margins, turned over more page corners, and underlined more material in this book than any other in my library. Although his examples are rooted in (what he admits issomewhat heretical) biology, they can be applied to many other areas of complex systems as well. I think he is really on to something big....
Rating:
Summary: Extremely stimulating. This book provokes thought!
Review: This is a must read book for anyone interested in ideas as a whole and in ideas that have deep ramifications for business organizations and other organizations, e.g., the church. It's thought provoking to the max. If you are frustrated with bureacracy and stymied by entropy, here are some fresh ideas
Rating: 
Summary: exciting ideas but needs an editor
Review: Stuart Kauffman's book presents some exciting and apparently new and original ideas (though since I'm a layman I can't tell how new and original) about molecular biology and other complex "autocatalytic" systems that have the features of life. A central idea of the book is that when the diversity of molecules (or other components) in a system (such as a cell) becomes sufficiently large, the system becomes a self sustaining interlinked web of reactions, i.e. it becomes "alive". The general idea can be proved mathematically in some model systems. What remains unclear to me is how this theory applies in detail to cell biology, whose chemistry is wildly complicated. Also unclear is how the system evolved from the simplest building blocks to reach the sufficient level of complexity needed to become alive. In other words, I'd like to see a full picture of evolution including the first steps of molecular evolution. But I suppose Kauffman's theory is possible and worth considering futher. The main detraction of the book is its ecstatic writing style. Even this wouldn't be so bad except that the author repeats the same ecstatic visions many times throughout, by re-phrasing them a slightly different way. One expects a certain amount of salesmanship in a book for a popular audience, but it is over done. The book needed a tough editor. If I find another book explaining the same fascinating ideas, the present book will probably get demoted a couple stars.
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating look at self-organization
Review: We see a great deal of order in living systems. Where does this order come from? Is it entirely from natural selection? The author says no. He explains that much of the order we see in the world is spontaneous, such as in the symmetry of snowflakes, and that much of the order needed for the origination of life and in living organisms is of this spontaneous nature.
Kauffman is making a non-trivial point here, as the extent to which spontaneous order is more important than selected order is not entirely obvious. While a snowflake is indeed an example of a system that is highly ordered as it gets synthesized, that's not true of, say, a solar system, in which short-lived bodies quickly depart the scene in favor of long-lived ones. It's clearly significant that disordered entities tend to be shorter-lived and unable to replicate.
The author then addresses theories of the origin of life. Could it have started with RNA? After all, replicating RNA could then produce the needed proteins. Kauffman says no. The amino acid chains one would need would be too long to replicate accurately enough (the "error catastrophe"). I tend to agree. Besides, RNA is awfully fragile (DNA is not fragile). And once one hypothesizes that RNA has a template to keep it safe, one's theory is that templates came first.
Of course, the "error catastrophe" is devastating if the minimum complexity of a living cell is rather large. Kauffman argues that this minimum complexity is indeed large, and that it is no accident that there are hundreds of genes in pleuromona, perhaps the simplest free-living (non-virus) organism.
Spontaneous order also refutes the argument of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life could not have arisen on Earth because the chance of creating the 2000 functioning enzymes would be too small: 1 in 10 to the 40,000. Well, given that life does exist here, that argument is almost certainly wrong (with a chance that small, the odds would be overwhelmingly small for life to arise anywhere, ever, so the chance that the argument is wrong must be huge, since a correct argument might then give a much higher probability for life to appear).
The author then asks how we get the large polymers we need. After all, life is basically autocatalysis (that's what I was taught in the 1960s, and that's what Kauffman says as well). How does this big autocatalytic set get into gear? The author makes an analogy to putting connectors between random pairs of entities. At first the length of a connected chain will be small. But once the number of connections is about half the number of entities, the longest chain quickly becomes almost as large as the number of entities. That raises the question of how all these entities can interact, but Kaufmann says that having reactions on a substrate, effectively reducing the region to two dimensions, helps. So does having less water around.
We then get to the question of homeostasis. That requires plenty of order. Is there a way to get that order "for free?" The author says there is, and here is where he makes his most dramatic point. He points out that a network with 100,000 entities (call them "light bulbs") with two states each, has 10 to the 30,000 possible states. One might expect such a network to cycle through the square root of the number of states, or 10 to the 15,000. But it actually tends to cycle through the square root of the number of binary variables, which is only the square root of 100,000 or about 317. That is a huge amount of "order for free!" And it argues strongly for life's origination to be unsurprising. As Kauffman puts it, this changes life on Earth from being "We, the improbable," to "We the expected."
There's plenty more in this fine book. The author discusses order in ontogeny. And he has a chapter on the relationship between the diversity of species in an ecosystem and the diversity of organic molecules added from outside. And there's also plenty of material on "fitness landscapes."
One question that arises in this book is statistical: how long does a species tend to last? That has implications for the question of how long humans will last. It may not be that long. But that doesn't bother me, as long as we're replaced with something better. After all, I'm for progress!
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic and enlightening
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Autocatalytic sets and more.
Review: 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?
Rating:
Summary: My first exposure to the topic
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A brave view on how we got here
Review: 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.
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