At home in the universe
A major scientific revolution has begun, a new paradigm that rivals Darwin's theory in importance. At its heart is the discovery of the order that lies deep within the most complex of systems, from the origin of life, to the workings of giant corporations, to the rise and fall of great civilizations. And more than anyone else, this revolution is the work of one man, Stuart Kauffman, a MacArthur Fellow and visionary pioneer of the new science of complexity. Now, in At Home in the Universe, Kauffman brilliantly weaves together the excitement of intellectual discovery and a fertile mix of insights to give the general reader a fascinating look at this new science - and at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos.
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What Hacker News says
- I was fascinated by "At Home In The Universe" back in the 90s. But this seems like a rehashing of the same ideas, without new evidence or theory. Anything new here?
- Reading the introductory paragraph to the paper, it sounds like a rehash of Kaufmann's (very good) book "At Home in the Universe", which at this point is almost 30 years old. Not sure what this paper adds, but will read it to find out.
The thesis of Kaufmann's book is that the emergence of life, given supporting conditions (variety of source chemicals in environment, sources of energy, maybe water/mixing) is all but inevitable (hence life being "at home" in the universe) rather than being some rare event.
The reasoning is that when these preconditions are met there will be a variety of chemical chain reactions occurring where the product of one reaction is used as the input to the next, and eventually reaction chains that include products that act as catalysts for parts of the reaction chain. These types of reaction can be considered as a primitive metabolism - consuming certain environmental chemicals and producing others useful to the metabolism.
From here to proto-cells and the beginning of evolution all it takes is some sort of cell-like container which (e.g.) need be nothing more than than something like froth on the seashore, based out of whatever may be floating on the water surface. Initial "reproduction" would be based on physical agitation (e.g wave action) breaking cells and creating new ones.
Different locations would have different micro-environments with different locally occurring reaction chains and "proliferation/survival of the fittest" would be the very beginning of evolution, as those reactions better able to utilize chemical sources and support their own structure/metabolism would become more widespread.
Anyway, a good book and plausible thesis in general (one could easily adapt the specifics from seashore to deep sea thermal vents etc).
- See Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, for a discussion in depth. It's a property of all life. I think of it as a zone between inanimate and immolated. We need energy flow to live, but too much kills.
- You are not the first to face such challenges and to consider suicide.
R. Buckminster Fuller, one of the most influential writers of the 20th Century and a favorite of the hippie/Whole Earth Catalog movement, faced such a moment on the banks of Lake Michigan when he considered drowning himself. This was when he was young and before he reached international fame for his ideas in architecture and philosophy.
I recommend reading Chapter 8, “Dialectic by Lake Michigan”, from the book *Buckminster Fuller: At Home in the Universe* to understand the reasoning he himself developed that night that led him to choose life and thus become the global celebrity the world knows him as.
Because of the good fight the Internet Archive is winning to make back-catalog in-print books available for digital checkout, you can visit archive.org right now, register, and read the chapter for yourself.
- An argument for life being expected is made pretty well in the book "At Home in the Universe" by Stuart Kaufman (spelling?).
We the expected.
- Interesting read around that question: Stuart Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity
