Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Kauffman couldn’t help it. For nearly a quarter of a century he had been a man in the grip of a vision—a vision that he found so powerful, so compelling, so overwhelmingly beautiful that he simply could not hold it in. The closest English word for it is “order.” But that word doesn’t begin to capture what he meant by it. To hear Kauffman talk about order was to hear the language of mathematics, logic, and science being used to express a kind of primal mysticism. For Kauffman, order was an answer to the mystery of human existence, an explanation for how we could possibly come to exist as living, thinking creatures in a universe that seems to be governed by accident, chaos, and blind natural law. For Kauffman, order told us how we could indeed be an accident of nature—and yet be very much more than just an accident. Yes, Kauffman always hastened to add, Charles Darwin was absolutely right: human beings and all other living things are undoubtedly the heirs of four billion years of random mutation, random catastrophes, and random struggles for survival; we are not here as the result of divine intervention, or even space aliens. But, he would emphasize, neither was Darwinian natural selection the whole story. Darwin didn’t know about self-organization—matter’s incessant attempts to organize itself into ever more complex structures, even in the face of the incessant forces of dissolution described by the second law of thermodynamics. Nor did Darwin know that the forces of order ...