The origins of order
Stuart Kauffman here presents a brilliant new paradigm for evolutionary biology, one that extends the basic concepts of Darwinian evolution to accommodate recent findings and perspectives from the fields of biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics. The book drives to the heart of the exciting debate on the origins of life and maintenance of order in complex biological systems. It focuses on the concept of self-organization: the spontaneous emergence of order widely observed throughout nature. Kauffman here argues that self-organization plays an important role in the emergence of life itself and may play as fundamental a role in shaping life's subsequent evolution as does the Darwinian process of natural selection. Yet until now no systematic effort has been made to incorporate the concept of self-organization into evolutionary theory. The construction requirements which permit complex systems to adapt remain poorly understood, as is the extent to which selection itself can yield systems able to adapt more successfully. This book explores these themes. It shows how complex systems, contrary to expectations, can spontaneously exhibit stunning degrees of order, and how this order, in turn, is essential for understanding the emergence and development of life on Earth.
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4recommend
7mentions
7people
2016–2024years
57% recommend43% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- If you want to read more about how this works, I'd recommend Stuart Kauffman's "The origins of order".
Be warned, it's not light reading, it's basically his PhD student's and his research, written up as a book, it is engaging though, and he leads you gently through the concepts - you do have to master one chapter before getting to the next though. Having said that, it does show how chaos and order interact with each other, and he then leads into the mechanism of evolution along the boundary of that interaction.
Spoiler: the boundary is where all the interesting stuff happens...
- I went I read the first few paragraphs I thought, "Is someone ripping off Stuart Kaufmann? He was writing about this idea thirty years ago." Then I read the first author: Stuart Kaufmann.
For those of you following along at home, Kaufmann has been developing the ideas here for decades. The paper is less a "here is a new idea" and much more "here is a concise summary of 50 years of work". The words and thoughts seem opaque, but this is case where they actually have concrete and specific meanings. It's worth noting too, that towards the end of the article he outlines experiments that could be used to falsify the theory.
If you want a really hard-core dive into the ideas, then check out his 1993 book, "On The Origins of Order" (ISBN 978-0-19-507951-7).
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-order...
- for a good introduction to order and complexity (including intelligence) arising from nothing, read "the origins of order" by stuart kauffman.
- The Origins of Order by Stuart Kauffman - Reality is autocatalytic of life.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand - civilization as a struggle of producers vs. looters; selfishness > altruism; the love of money is the root of mostly good.
A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram - Simple rules can yield arbitrarily complex behavior. Therefore reality is inherently computational from the lowest levels.
- > [emergence of order]
The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (1991)
https://www.abebooks.com/9780195058116/Origins-Order-Self-Or...
> Did mitochondria have any idea
It remains a possibility, not subject to fascile dismissal, that ‘our world’ is a side-effect of a self reflecting mind. You will note on serious reflection that all you know and experience is ‘image’ and ‘imagination’. Now that there is a ‘correspondence’ to an ‘outside reality’ is only obtained when there are 2 or more of ‘us sentients’ and we compare notes using ‘language’ (with all its limitations and to be understood in its maximal sense & associated limitations, including ‘expression’, ‘communication’ and ‘reading’).
> Biology is applied physics
Not all applications of physical laws result in living forms. Physics can be applied to understand (some aspects) of biological entities given that they are (conceptuallyminimally in part) made of physical stuff subject to governing regime of matter we study as physics.
- I think Kauffman has been developing this set of ideas for a while now. I remember reading his "the origins of order" and find a lot of the ideas from the book here in more evolved forms. He really got me into visualising complex systems and their state spaces etc.
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