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A review by hilaritas
At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity by Stuart A. Kauffman
3.0
This book was all over the dang place, and not really in a good way. The problem is a lack of intellectual discipline on behalf of the author. Kauffman is trying to serve several masters with this book, and it ends up a mash. Not only is he giving an excited account of his academic work modeling certain types of systems which might or might not have a bearing on evolutionary ecologies, but he's also trying to extend those models to areas where he admittedly has no expertise (like technology, politics, and law) and also stating grand ontological theories of our place in the world.
His fundamental biological point is that life could be an emergent population of auto-catalyzing systems of molecular substrates and enzymes of sufficient diversity. His view is thus that life is actually almost inevitable given the mathematical likelihood of order emerging in such situations. He believes this despite the admitted failure of any laboratory to reproduce such an occurrence, but okay. He also thinks those models might, MIGHT, apply to political orders and to technological innovations, although he says over and over that he doesn't have any real basis for those views other than a hunch.
His grand philosophical aim is creating a new secular sense of the sacred in which we marvel that we are meant to be here because life is so suited to the underlying math of the universe, and that somehow this emergent quality of math is better than blind chance and the atomism of DNA (I dunno man). I admire his attempt to find some meaning beyond the clockwork god, but frankly, I don't understand what he's on about. How is a firmer case for the anthropic principle evidence of a non-mystical sense of the sacred, whatever that is? On his view, we're still random, we're just more likely to arise. And how do we know that we're not in a vanishingly rare goldilocks universe in a multiverse of dead variants?
I am not heartened that life was inevitable or slightly more likely than not, because life is a given at this point. Pushing the timetable back or weighting the dice in our favor doesn't have anything fundamental to say about ultimate purpose, because we're still either products of chance in a meaningless universe, or there is an unseen hand. He wants the math describing the universe to be that hand, but it's still just physics, not metaphysics. There's a lot of beard-stroking in this book, ultimately signifying little.
His fundamental biological point is that life could be an emergent population of auto-catalyzing systems of molecular substrates and enzymes of sufficient diversity. His view is thus that life is actually almost inevitable given the mathematical likelihood of order emerging in such situations. He believes this despite the admitted failure of any laboratory to reproduce such an occurrence, but okay. He also thinks those models might, MIGHT, apply to political orders and to technological innovations, although he says over and over that he doesn't have any real basis for those views other than a hunch.
His grand philosophical aim is creating a new secular sense of the sacred in which we marvel that we are meant to be here because life is so suited to the underlying math of the universe, and that somehow this emergent quality of math is better than blind chance and the atomism of DNA (I dunno man). I admire his attempt to find some meaning beyond the clockwork god, but frankly, I don't understand what he's on about. How is a firmer case for the anthropic principle evidence of a non-mystical sense of the sacred, whatever that is? On his view, we're still random, we're just more likely to arise. And how do we know that we're not in a vanishingly rare goldilocks universe in a multiverse of dead variants?
I am not heartened that life was inevitable or slightly more likely than not, because life is a given at this point. Pushing the timetable back or weighting the dice in our favor doesn't have anything fundamental to say about ultimate purpose, because we're still either products of chance in a meaningless universe, or there is an unseen hand. He wants the math describing the universe to be that hand, but it's still just physics, not metaphysics. There's a lot of beard-stroking in this book, ultimately signifying little.