Investigations

300 Pages·2000·184.481 MB·English

by  Stuart A. Kauffman

I N V E S T I G A T I O NS
Stuart A. Kauffman
I N V E S T I G A T I O NS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
2000
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kauffman, Stuart A.
Investigations / by Stuart A. Kauffman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-512104-x
1. Life—Origin—Philosophy. 2. Self-organizing systems—Philosophy. 3. Molecular evolution-
Philosophy. 4. Evolution (Biology)—Philosophy. I. Title.
QH325 .K389 2000
576.8 '8 '01—dc2i
99-055452
0-19-512104-x
Book design and composition by Mark McGarry, Texas Type & Book Works
Set in Minion
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Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
. K . 3 %1
Z o oO
An organized being is then not a mere machine, for that has merely
moving power, but it possesses in itself formative power of a
self-propagating kind which it communicates to its materials
though they have it not of themselves; it organizes them, in fact, and
this cannot be explained by the mere mechanical faculty of motion.
IMMANUEL KANT
Critique of Judgment

CONTENTS
Preface ix
Prolegomenon to a General Biology 1
The Origins of Life 23
Autonomous Agents 49
Propagating Organization 81
A Physics of Semantics? 109
Emergence and Story: Beyond Newton, Einstein, and Bohr?
The Nonergodic Universe: The Possibility of New Laws 141
Candidate Laws for the Coconstruction of a Biosphere 159
The Persistently Innovative Econosphere 211
A Coconstructing Cosmos? 243
Epilogue 267
References 271
Index 273

PREFACE
Investigations is, without a doubt, the strangest and most surprising pilgrimage of
my scientific life. At the outset, in December of 1994,1 began an ongoing notebook.
Thinking of Wittgenstein and his shattering break with logical atomism in his
Philosophical Investigations and sensing that something vast and inarticulate
waited to be uncovered, I entitled that notebook "Investigations." For the entire
winter, spring, and summer of 1995 and again in the fall of that year, after a month
trekking in the Everest region, I struggled sideways, backward, and sometimes for-
ward. A rough version was published as a Santa Fe Institute preprint in September
of 1996. I returned to the topic a year later and have worked at it since then.
Whatever Investigations is—useful, as I hope, or foolish—it is not normal science.
Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of Investigations, both as process and the re-
sulting book, was my puzzled realization that the way Newton, Einstein, and Bohr
taught us to do science may be incomplete. You see, in following their cornerstone
examples of physics, we are taught to prestate the particles, forces, laws, and initial
and boundary conditions, then compute the consequences. In this enterprise, we
are able to state ahead of time what the full space of possibilities is, that is, we can fi-
nitely prestate the configuration space of possibilities of the system in question. This
capacity to prestate the configuration space, for example, is the central conceptual
presupposition of the classical statistical mechanics of a liter of gas in its 6N-dimen-
sional phase space of all possible positions and momenta of the N particles of gas.
But I was, to my deep surprise, led to doubt that we can ever prestate the con-
figuration space of a biosphere. The core issue arises with what Darwin called
"preadaptations," namely, causal consequences of parts of organisms that were not
of adaptive significance in the normal environment of the organism, but might
come to be of adaptive significance in some new environment and end up being se-
lected by natural selection. Thus arose hearing, lungs, flight—virtually all major
and probably most or all minor adaptations. But could we say ahead of time all the
odd, context-dependent causal consequences of bits and pieces of organisms that
might be of selective significance in some odd environment, hence, to come into
actual physical existence in the biosphere? I think not. And if not, then we cannot
finitely prestate the configuration space of a biosphere.
So the biosphere, it seems, in its persistent evolution, is doing something liter-
ally incalculable, nonalgorithmic, and outside our capacity to predict, not due to
quantum uncertainty alone, nor deterministic chaos alone, but for a different,
equally, or more profound reason: Emergence and persistent creativity in the phys-
ical universe is real.
I think I am correct in the above statement. But then what are the implications
for science and society? We have thought, in part, that the unfolding of society and
culture could be brought under the sway of science. On the other hand, Sun Tzu,
four centuries prior to Christ, and Clausewitz, in the early nineteenth century, in,
respectively, The Art of War and On War, both stressed the totally unexpected ways
of battle and the need for intuition and command genius, whatever the science
lying behind strategy and tactics. Science and art—the practical getting on with it,
wissen versus kônnen in German, "know that" versus "know-how" in English, min-
gle in our daily lives. Yet kônnen, "know-how," has no place in our science. Why?
But that takes me to the starting questions of Investigations. Consider a bac-
terium swimming upstream in a glucose gradient. We readily say that the bac-
terium is going to get food, that is, the bacterium is acting on its own behalf in an
environment. Call a system able to act on its own behalf in an environment an "au-
tonomous agent." All free-living cells and organisms are autonomous agents. But
the bacterium is "just" a physical system. In its Kantian form, my core question be-
came, What must a physical system be such that it can act on its own behalf?
The stunning fact is that autonomous agents do, every day, reach out and ma-
nipulate the universe on their own behalf. Yet that truth is nowhere in contempo-
rary physics, chemistry, or even biology. So, what must a physical system be to be
an autonomous agent?
I think I have found a plausible answer. I had not expected even the outlines of
my answer. It may be that I have stumbled upon the proper definition of life itself.
In the process, I have been led down strange pathways to a critique of the physi-
cist's concept of work and work cycles—Maxwell's demon—toward the heart of a
proper concept of organization that is not matter alone, energy alone, entropy
alone, or information alone. In fact, a bacterial cell or colony is doing something
that we cannot yet state clearly: The cell or colony is a "propagating organization,"
that is, that it literally constructs more of itself. What the cell and colony are doing
has no statement in current physics or biology but constitutes that which con-
structs a biosphere.
Moreover, we are on the verge of the capacity to create novel molecular au-
tonomous agents. When we do, or if we discover life on other planets and solar sys-
tems, science will enter a vast new phase in which we will create a "general biology,"
freed from the limitations of terrestrial biology. Such a general biology will neces-
sarily lift physics and chemistry up to new levels as these disciplines and biology
struggle to understand what general laws may govern biospheres anywhere in the
cosmos. And the experimental creation of molecular autonomous agents will un-
leash a technological revolution equal to the computer revolution. We will create
physical systems able to evolve by selection to carry out tasks we desire.
Investigations broaches four candidate laws for any biosphere. The deepest is re-
lated to the following question: Might there be a fourth law of thermodynamics for
self-constructing open thermodynamic systems such as biospheres? There are
good reasons to think that no such law is possible. Yet I believe there may well be
such a law: Biospheres, as a secular trend, that is, over the long term, become as di-
verse as possible, literally expanding the diversity of what can happen next. In
other words, biospheres expand their own dimensionality as rapidly, on average, as
they can.
And the coconstructing behaviors of autonomous agents spill over to the econ-
omy, with surprising implications for the foundations of economics, for economic
growth, and for the development of adaptive firms that coevolve in corporate
ecosystems whose dynamics almost certainly express the same laws as do biological
ecosystems, with small and large gales of Schumpeterian creative destruction,
weeding out old species and technologies, ushering in the ever new species and
technologies whose nonprestatable features are expressions of the very creativity of
the universe.
And if we cannot prestate the configuration space of a biosphere, how can we
prestate the configuration space of the universe? But this bears on the problem of
time in general relativity and has led me, in collaboration with Lee Smolin, a quan-
tum gravity cosmologist, to quite unexpected ideas about how the universe might
select its own laws and, somewhat like a biosphere, coconstruct itself.
No, Investigations is not normal science. I do know what normal science is. My
previous two books, Origins of Order and At Home in the Universe, are examples.
The first sought to exemplify processes of self-organization in biology and to lay
out the need to rebuild evolutionary theory as a marriage of two sources of order
in biology—self-organization and selection. Fitness landscapes, coevolutionary av-
alanches, the unexpected ordered behavior of model genetic regulatory networks,