Investigations,   ISBN:9780195121056

Customer Rating: 

According to the introduction, the author started writing his ideas about complexity in a notebook in order to understand the interrelationships in a better way; he also mentioned that he did not know if his "investigations" would be useful or absurd, but he thinks he has arrived at a "new theory". The book is virtually full of ideas written for the author himself; the concepts are mercilessly "thrown" at you without previous explanations, so be sure you have previous basic knowledge on the topics. I am not exaggerating when I say that this is among the 10 top-worst written books that I have read, but the ideas are truly novel and amazing; I will surely return to them in the future.

Throughout the book Mr. Kauffman tries to establish the foundations of what he calls a "general biology", meaning the laws that would govern life and evolving biospheres everywhere in our universe or maybe even in any universe. In science as we know it, we assume we can determine the space of configurations beforehand, whereas the author claims that in complex systems like biospheres this is impossible due to its non-ergodic (non repeatable) nature.

The investigations try to answer fundamental questions like the "origin of life". Life most probably did not occur as a spontaneous "replication of molds", like the auto-copying mechanism of DNA, which only appeared later. Instead, he proposes that life emerged out of a collective autocatalytic system in which molecule A catalyzes the production of molecule B out of B's fragments and B catalyzes the production of A out of its fragments. Now imagine this autocatalytic system but conformed of hundreds of proteins and peptides; the ever increasing molecular complexity achieved by way of recombinations of the existing molecules gives way to life as an "emergent collective behavior of complex chemical networks".

The question "what is life?" is approached by introducing autonomous agents, which are defined as "autocatalytic systems able to reproduce themselves and to perform one or more cycles of thermodynamic work", he also defines them as "a physical system able to act selfishly". Here you will find the explanation of Carnot's work cycle in which a full work cycle can be completed automatically by a simple machine by way of a controlled release of energy. Then the system returns to the initial state in order be able to start another cycle. Autonomous agents complete work cycles for their own benefit in different ways, but mainly by way of chemical reactions (e.g. metabolical reactions) that release energy to perform recurrent work cycles. For other equally astonishing definitions of life read Tree of Knowledge and Life Itself: Exploring the Realm of the Living Cell.

Mr. Kauffman explains "Maxwell's demon" to measure a system's small deviations from equilibrium (equivalent to obtaining information from the system to take advantage of this deviations and obtain energy to produce work), thereby relating "information" to "entropy reduction". In later chapters the author proposes a new thermodynamic law, which could also account for "the arrow of time" (for a good explanation of the arrow of time read Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity). This "new law" states that instead of tending to equilibrium and arriving at a state of maximal entropy, our biosphere and probably the entire universe tend to the adjacent possible as quickly as they can, breaking more symmetries each time and remaining in a non-equilibrium state from which energy can be obtained by coupled systems and autonomous agents to perform work in an endless loop of complex reactions and cycles. For better explanations of statistical physics, power laws and thermodynamic concepts read also Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another and Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics. This latter explains many of Mr. Kauffman's ideas - including evolution and co-evolution, adaptive surfaces, etc.- but in a clear, concise and well written manner. Chaos: Making a New Science is also a great introduction to the topic.

In some chapters the ideas seemed not fully formed and in my opinion are very close to speculation, specially the chapter where he tries to link Mr. Smolin's quantum gravity theories (alternative to the "superstring theory") with his idea of a fourth law of thermodynamics; not to mention a brief but completely unreadable appendix on consciousness (Spanish edition by Tusquets-Metatemas). I usually love when scientists get out of their area of knowledge and link concepts of other fields to their own expertise to form new hypothesis; but this time I think it went way too far.

Customer Rating: 

I was disappointed by this book. Kauffman's work with cellular automata and his book The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution inspired me to go to graduate school and study complexity theory. I was excited to read Investigations, hoping it would sum up all of Kauffman's research in an insightful way. I gave up reading it about 1/3 of the way through because it seemed like he had spent the first 100 pages talking about how amazing and unifying his ideas were without really providing the ideas to match to bluster.

I have found that much of Kauffman's research is immensely insightful and a decade to two ahead of its time. However, this book gave me the feeling that his ego was a decade or two ahead of his research.

Customer Rating: 

Kaufman is not a "science writer", he is one of the worlds senior and most distinguished scientists and he has in this book opened his personal notebook of his most cutting-edge arguments and speculation. Fortunately, he also happens to be an excellent writer. As other reviewers have noted, parts of this book may be difficult to read without prior knowledge of the varied subject areas, but for those of us fascinated by how the universe works this book provides a new high-water mark of explanation. Kaufman pulls together his own and others' ideas in fields including molecular biology, ecology, complexity theory, physics and economics to bring into high relief a significant fact: all around us we see evolving and ever-increasing organizational complexity yet our physical and social sciences have not incorporated that fact into their mainstream theories. Physics has the laws of thermodynamics to specify how the universe becomes more disordered, but no laws to specify the obvious tendency of the universe to become more organized in the presence of an energy gradient. Economics has detailed theories to explain utility maximization and supply and demand balancing given a static set of goods and services, but no mainstream theory to explain the constant increase in economic diversity. Complexity theory provides mathematical tools and simulations that emulate physical complexity but it has not been effectively integrated into mainstream science. Numerous other writers have presented the idea of emergent complexity in biology, such as Capra or Lowenstein, but none that I have read so completely explore, elucidate, extend and defend with experimental evidence the concept as Kaufman does in this book. Buy and read this book. If at first you don't get it, read some related books and come back to it. It is very exciting to feel the approaching wave of a revolution in scientific thinking!

Customer Rating: 

This is a great book. Not by the suggested answers to the problems related to the notion of Life, but by the questions which are asked. It breaks dogmas in physics which simply do not allow the comprehension of biology from a physical perspective. Kauffman notes limits of our actual physics, and proposes tentative ways of exploring.
This book is good for anyone with an inquisitive mind and a desire to explore the nature of Life.
(...)

Customer Rating: 

Stuart Kauffman has been probing the "deep structure" of life for decades. He is one of the founding members of the Santa Fe Institute, the leading center for the emerging sciences of complexity. His work therein started in complex Boolean networks in which he found "order for free" in a void seeming to consist of nothing but chaos. This lead him to highly dynamical yet self-structuring autocatalytic sets (now known as "Kauffman sets") which eventually lead him to search for a general biology from which all of life could extrapolate. Kauffman never was much for neo-Darwinism or natural selection, and here he continues his holistic approach to self-organizing biospheres.

Investigations attempts, in part, to outline four candidate laws governing biospheres (large dynamical systems full of self-organizing autonomous agents - such as the universe itself). A lofty pursuit to be sure, givien that biospheres are teeming with so much complexity, interdependence and obscured initial states (to name just a few of the obvious pitfalls). There are also the problems, as Kauffman points out, that biospheres are "nonergodic" and their "nonequilibrium" flowing into a "persistent adjacent other."

Recondite minutia notwithstanding, Investigations is fun in a way not many books of this intellectual magnitude are. Kauffman cuts the hard science with wit and pondering of the utmost human persuasion. While he undermines the very foundations on which modern science stands (the work of Newton, Boltzman, Einstein and Bohr), Kauffman compares the geniuses of Shakespeare and Einstein ("I'm not sure whose genius is the more awesome, " he says.) and emphasizes the importance of story in understanding our lives in the universe.

With a healthy mix of speculation, cutting-edge science and hypothesis steeped in years of grappling with the hard questions, Stuart Kauffman's Investigations is sure to inspire and intrigue, as well as confound and confuse. As he says, "Oh, confusion. Perhaps a certain confusion is healthy. We have not tried to embrace all of this at once before."