At Home in the Universe
By Stuart Kauffman
Oxford University Press, 1995. 321 pp.
Published in Australia in January by Penguin, $16.95
Reviewed by Allen Myers
This is a challenging and fascinating book, one that may be destined to be as influential as Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species.
Kauffman contends, not that Darwin was wrong, but that he told only part of the story. What the remainder of the story consists of is indicated by this book's subtitle: "The Search for the Laws of Self-Organisation and Complexity".
The problem with natural selection as the sole explanation of evolution is that even the 4+ billion years since the earth's surface cooled sufficiently to make life possible isn't anywhere near enough time to produce the biosphere only through random mutation. Moreover, the fossil record in places is directly contrary to natural selection: for example, in the "Cambrian explosion", whole new families and phyla appear "suddenly" and more or less contemporaneously, rather than gradually evolving from a common ancestor.
So where do these phyla/families — and, for that matter, life itself — come from? If "self-organisation" sounds too mystical, rest assured that Kauffman is a consistent materialist: "Laws of complexity spontaneously generate much of the order of the natural world. It is only then that [natural] selection comes into play, further molding and refining."
As for life, it "... is a natural property of complex chemical systems ... when the number of different kinds of molecules in a chemical soup passes a certain threshold, a self-sustaining network of reactions — an autocatalytic metabolism — will suddenly appear."
Probably no scientists in the world was less surprised than Kauffman by the recent discovery of evidence that life once existed on Mars. His own researches have led him to the conclusion that the universe is likely to be swarming with life: "... the spontaneous emergence of self-sustaining webs [i.e., life] is so natural and robust that it is even deeper than the specific chemistry that happens to exist on earth; it is rooted in mathematics itself".
This recalls the phrase of Marx and Engels, who described life as the "mode of existence" of protein. But with the benefit of modern biological discoveries and computer technology, Kauffman is able to begin the exploration of the specific laws that appear to govern evolution.
The mathematics of life and evolution are those of the "phase transition" — what Hegel would have called the transformation of quantity into quality. Phase transitions are the boundary between order and chaos — which will not surprise any dialectician. Kauffman's leap forward is to use computer simulation to begin discovering the mathematical laws of such biological transitions.
It is not possible here to summarise even the basic methodology of Kauffman's research, let alone the conclusions, insights, surmises and indicators of future research to which it leads. The topics covered as arenas of self-organisation range from the origin of life through species evolution, ontogeny (the reproduction of an entire individual from a single-celled embryo), the interaction of evolution between species in an ecosystem, the evolution of ecosystems and the evolution of evolution itself.
Throughout, Kauffman is careful to distinguish between accepted scientific fact and his own "heretical" views. (Darwin too was a heretic, in 19th century biology.) Much of the presentation is necessarily mathematical, but it is a mathematics that can be and is presented in plain English, so the book is accessible to those, like this reviewer, who have no special mathematical training. Those who let themselves be frightened away from the book will deny themselves an intellectual treat.
However, my enthusiasm for this book does need tempering by a few caveats. The least important but most annoying is Kauffman's tendency, reflected in the book's title, to draw pseudo-spiritual feel-good messages from his science.
According to Kauffman, if the laws of self-organisation mean that life is the normal result of a suitably complex chemical mix, then the human species is no longer an incredibly unlikely accident, but "at home". But the laws of self-organisation are themselves laws of statistics, i.e. of accident. The fact that the accident of life may be far more common than previously thought is of considerable scientific importance, but it doesn't justify putting a New Age gloss on traditional US shallow optimism. Whether the accidents that produced us were likely or unlikely, we have to make ourselves at home in the best way we can.
It is also annoying, though only superficially surprising, that Kauffman's mathematical documentation of the laws of dialectics in biology should dismiss Hegel and dialectical materialism with the passing comment, "These ideas now stand discredited. Yet thesis, antithesis, synthesis sounds more than a little bit like the evolution of the hundreds of millions of species that have come and gone ...".
More than a little indeed. But dialectical materialism is not studied seriously in US universities, which is the main reason that the laws of change normally impose themselves on scientists as a surprise.
A serious study of Hegel, even a brief one, might have helped Kauffman to avoid the book's most serious failing: the effort to extend the biological laws which he has begun to outline into inappropriate fields, such as technology. Of course there are analogies between the conflicting constraints in the design of an airplane and in the "design" of a horse or a tree fern. But analogies are only analogies, rather than identities, because scientific — and other — truths are concrete, related to their own fields of application.
We can safely leave it to the engineers to decide whether the mathematics of evolution suggest useful techniques in their discipline. Where there is serious danger of misuse of Kauffman's work is in politics. Darwin's science was illegitimately extended into the pseudo-science of social Darwinism. A similar misuse of Kauffman's science is all the more likely since he, unlike Darwin, encourages it.
Kauffman is aware of what he calls the "danger of deducing the optimality of the familiar", writing that "James Mill once deduced from what he considered indubitable first principles that a constitutional monarchy remarkably like that of England in his day was obviously the highest form of government". (He might have added the example of Hegel and the Prussian monarchy.)
Yet Kauffman is unable to resist the temptation to begin deducing from the laws of self-organisation the optimality of US "democracy" — and not even the real US political system, but an abstract and mythologised democracy which is not a system of rule by one group over another, but a mechanism for achieving "compromise" between shifting interest groups. Any "social Kauffmanism" is likely to be even more banal and vicious than its predecessor.
Despite these flaws, this is an extremely important and valuable book. Even if many of its postulates are eventually disproved, this could happen only through major advances in scientific understanding which it would have provoked, at least in part.