Superfly 2008-01-11

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

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.

Bryan Long 2004-09-29

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

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!

Carlos Gershenson 2004-05-24

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

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.
(...)

roy christopher 2004-03-15

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

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."

Bosco Ho 2003-03-10

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

Normally I'd dismiss out of hand anyone who claims to have found a fourth law of thermodynamics but from Stuart Kauffman, I'll hear what he has to say. I've been following Kauffman's work for years and his thinking is as engaging as ever. Unfortunately, his prose is not. Grandiose, clumsy and over-written, he sells his ideas short. The language is unreadably uneven as it ranges from patronising pop-sci gobbley-gook to technical minutaie of molecular biology.

Kauffman attempts to articulate something that he calls "general biology". This is simply a dressed-up term for the classic problem of the origin of life. Unfortunately, his explanation also follows the classic pop-sci strategy of explaining one mysterious thing (life) by replacing it with other equally mysterious concepts (work and semantics). In this part of the book, the writing is woefully repetitive and elliptic. No real conclusions are drawn, which is a a monumental let-down given the ego-maniacally overblown introduction. There is an intellectual abyss between Kauffman's definition of life as auto-catalytic systems with one work cycle, and real cells that undergo reproduction and darwinian evolution.

Nevertheless, there are many nuggets of gold in the later chapters. Probably the most interesting is the idea of the adjacent possible. The adjacent possible is the set of all possible chemicals that can be synthesized in one chemical step from all existing chemicals. Unlike other concepts introduced in the book, it is something that can be computed (though not exhaustively). Kauffman then proposes a fourth law of chemical thermodynamics: a chemical system advances into the adjacent-possible as fast as it can. Kauffman shows how this hypothetical fourth law can be analysed by relating this to his previous work on sustainable chemical diversity. Indeed, the best parts of the book are where Kauffman re-caps his previous work on auto-catalytic systems and genomes of real organisms, and then extends the analysis to explain his fourth law of thermodynamics.

Kauffman makes some neat analogies between the chemical adjacent-possible with economics. He points out that classical economic models of pricing rely on the assumption of a finite prestable collection of goods and services. Instead, a more fruitful model for an economy of products can be made in analogy to the ever-explanding set of catalytic chemicals. There is also a great analysis on the limits of the economy of scale where Kauffman makes a analogy between the Ksat problem and the problem of producing diverse products in a single factory. And finally, in the grand tradition of pop-sci books, there is a final chapter where all the problems of quantum mechanics and cosmology are solved with the application of one special idea. Although this last chapter is pure science fiction, the book is worth perservering as some of the ideas are original, useful and genuinely thought provoking.