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Review Summary: A Heavy-Laden Plodder with Unnecessary Anti-Religious Rhetoric |
Date: 2008-06-22 |
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Details: When you are the inspiration for a Jurassic Park character (or at least I think he was), then you immediately capture my attention. I'll buy your book, even if its subject matter is generally outside my interests.
Stuart Kauffman seems to have been at least partially the inspiration for the interesting chaotician character "Ian Malcolm" in Jurassic Park, and I thought his real life ideas would be as interesting as his fictional incarnation's ranting on chaos theory.
Not quite. At Home in the Universe *sounds* a lot more interesting than it *was*. It's plodding and jargon-heavy. Reading it felt like a burden, and I didn't come away feeling more informed or that I had encountered something thought-provoking.
Kauffman also frequently inserts random drivel about nature being sacred despite the falsehood of religion. Not only is that absurd on its face (sacred is *defined as* "set aside for religious veneration"), but what the hell does it have to do with his ideas about complexity and emerging order?
It strikes me as extremely disrespectful to mount attacks on your readers' religious beliefs, or narcissistic to assume that they would be the same as yours. We'd expect that kind of think from The God Delusion or God is Not Great, but atheist vitriol is way off topic here.
I see this as a worrisome, almost cancerous trend in the scientific community of the past 15 years or so, where the equations atheism=science and science=atheism actually sounds sensible to large swaths of people, who somehow can no longer distinguish between philosophical and methodological naturalism.
It seems to be the flip side of the gradual degeneration of Christianity into a right wing political movement. Now millions of Americans see no difference between "likes Jesus" and "votes Republican." I don't know what these changes mean, but I do think the implications are wholly negative and its sad that Kauffman's books has to reflect so obviously on the state of affairs. |
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Review Summary: Chaos is every where |
Date: 2007-10-12 |
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Details: Actually the books is an outcome of scientific experiments in a computer lab. Differently from other reviewers, I want to notice that the facts of chaos exist in every where such as in Nature or in A Company.
Writer shows that everything in the world can be reduced to a series of chemical reactions. Chemical reactions can generate a complex system such as life from dead. He argues also the equilibrium of life and dead from the view of the number of kinds of molecules and the number of kinds of outcome from these molecules create or which are already in the system.
He also like many chaos theorist says that small changes in the system make big changes in the whole. (Explaining evalution). By some evidents and using probability, he shows that life on earth is the expected.
The books most important view is explaning everything as chemical reactions. And I believe this is the right thing...At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity |
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Review Summary: At home in the universe, A New Proposal... |
Date: 2007-04-05 |
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Details: In this book, Stuart Koaffman opens new doors to us. Through the theory of the chaos, proportions fractals and their networks boulinas, give an interesting speculation us on the origin of the life, the complex systems and the societies. It is hour to be on the awares and to try to focus to us in new horizons. This book took to him of the hand by these new horizons. It is hour to know our house in the universe... |
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Review Summary: Proposals to Unanswered Questions |
Date: 2006-09-15 |
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Details: Stuart Kaufman's At Home in the Universe is a lay redaction his scientific hypotheses from his Origins of Order, a rich, fascinating, sophisticated, and complementary set of hypotheses added to Darwin's theories of evolution. For the moment, at least, they are the promising fruit of speculative or theoretical biological hypotheses (with physics, chemistry, geology, paleontology, mathematics, game theory, and economics thrown in), but they go a long way to filling in many of the gaps that strict Darwinists seem content to ignore. And some of his hypotheses, he readily admits, are heretical.
One of the obvious problems, if not primary one, that Kaufman sets to answer, Is how can natural selection work, culling the fittest to survive, without something to act on? In other words, natural selection operates on the already existent (i.e., regressive engineering), not in the formation of the entity itself. Another problem is that 4 billion years, long as that is, is still not sufficient time for natural selection to have acted through a totally random, step-by-step process in determining today's survivors. Even 100 billion years would not be enough. Another problem is how could so many species have come into existence and failed to survive (99.9%), leaving a mere 100 million for the present, in the span of a mere 4 billion years (mathematically impossible on Darwin's theories alone).
The central theme of Kaufman's work is Self-organized Criticality, a scientific twist on the notion of irreducible complexity (from the Discovery Institute's lexicon, no less), where a minimal degree of inherent complexity in a subcritical-supercritical phase transition is what spontaneously orders the animate world and generates and sustains life in accord with other, as yet, unknown, but implicit laws. From the moment that a sufficiently critical diversity of molecules reached the ideal phase transition, life itself was "spontaneously generated" as inevitable, not by accident. Once life appeared, the acts of natural selection, adaptation, coevolution, evolution of coevolution, cellular, morphological, and physiological differentiation, ontogeny, niches, populations, stable cum-chaotic dynamics, etc., could operate, but in addition to forces beyond natural selection. And while speculative, apparently many scientists share Kaufman's intuitions, inferences, and insights.
But the "other" force or forces is not mystical, much less divine, even if they may be truly awesome. Rather, it is in the nature of the universe, and more particularly in our evolving earth, that these implicit laws work in tandem with Darwin's laws. At this point, these laws are posited from the empirical knowledge we do have, but have not yet demonstrated in the scientific manner to make them even hypotheses. But Kaufman's speculative biology is not a whimsical or arbitrary metaphysics, but logical inferences based on laws and facts already in place. Having done the easy work (thinking the notions of what these other general laws of nature must be like), now science must work in earnest to confirm or reject his speculative hypotheses.
The key word and concept throughout this humorous, heady, and exacting exposition is "complexity" and within the manifold complexities of lives, environments, and mutually intersecting dynamics is a spontaneous order that arises "for free" that in turn sustains stable and steady systems just at the subcritical-supercrticial phase transition (e.g., horizon, or "edge of chaos"). Another key word and concept is "dynamic." Steady-state and homeostasis are often thought of as a static plateau, but that is mistaken, as such states are actually in a fluctuating dynamic at the phase transition between equilibrium (death) and disequilibrium (disorder). Indeed, on many different levels, living organisms are born, dwell, and die precisely at this phase transition between the subcritical (stasis, moribund) and supercritical (chaotic, disordered) states. And the key thesis is that order ("for free") is embedded in the delicate balancing act precisely at this phase transition.
Kaufman extrapolates some of these implicit biological laws and applies them to human cultural and technological advancement. The "fit" is remarkably uncanny, helping us to understand some of the dynamics of technological improvements (and diminishing returns), innovation, extinction, and spontaneity of the economy. Perhaps the most salient features are the concepts of "dynamic" and "spontaneous."
Moreover, if an analogy can be drawn from the biosphere and ecology to the social and political realms, the overwhelming preponderance of biological evidence screams complexity, diversity, and interdependence of organisms and their environments, which arise spontaneously and reciprocally to each other, in a constant dynamic that is vibrant, active, and always on the threshold of "chaos," but retains some stability through change. It is only those social and political forms that are "adaptive" that are socially and politically the "fittest," and democracy and market economies are obviously the most adaptive mechanisms to adapt to changing human needs.
Frederick Hayek addressed himself to these very issues over 50 years ago, and called the market economy and democracies "spontaneous" associations, in contradistinction to "planned" economies and governments. The former "adapt" to changing environments and circumstances, while the latter lack flexibility, and thus do not easily yield to adaptive mechanisms. "Planned" economies attempt to calculate rationally human desires, motivations, and needs in either an abstract or a priori fashion, then calculate the mode of production, the degree, and whether to accommodate, as if some "Absolute Human Mind" could anticipate all contingencies and changes by a simple mathematical formula. The problem is that bureaucrats are notoriously theory-laden and too calculating to include, much less advance, diversity (think Medicare Part D for "planned" absurdity). In practice, socialisms impede innovation and stifle ingenuity. With no means of adaptation, there is no "fittest," much less any mechanism to adapt to the actual dynamics of the world.
Communism's planned economy is an extreme case of an irrational calculus asserting what the government will allow, applying the lowest-common denominator as a criterion of sufficiency. We all know of the U.S.S.R.'s food lines, limited products, forced housing, inferior merchandise, and minimal labor investment. But even weaker forms of the rational calculus, such as socialism, does not do much better. At least their democracies allow policies to change, even if it becomes years for government to adapt to the new exigencies. Even the most socialized societies have "capitalist" outlets, to provide some barometer of social wants and meeting them. Social insurance makes sense on many fronts, but social or state "planning" of economics has rotted state and worker. Kaufman's biological analogies explain why.
Postscript: Kaufman's book is a provocative, challenging, and fascinating (sometime heady) read. Even if all of his hypotheses in the abstract are found to be untrue, at least he captures the reader's imagination, and asks the questions that most of us non-dogmatic Darwinians have raised for some time. In a time when the "easy" and "orthodox" are all too convenient for slipping under the rug, Kaufman's questions (and suggested answers) go the the very nexus of the difficulties. His suggested answers are at once perhaps too simple, on the other hand, perhaps too complex. What is refreshing, above all, is that he's not afraid to ask, and even less fearful of suggesting solutions. Thank gawd for the Sante Fe Institute, where brave and curious minds still ask questions. |
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Review Summary: Fascinating Science Applicable to Evolution and Business |
Date: 2006-05-17 |
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Details: Stuart brings the science of complexity and complex adaptive systems to a broad range of topics from evolution to business to learning curves. The book is masterly written to allow you to skim over the formulas without lossing the excitement or to dig into the technology to understand its broad application. |
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out of 59 Reviews
