A World Beyond Physics, Stuart A. Kauffman
A World Beyond Physics, Stuart A. Kauffman
List: $12.99 | Sale: $9.10
Club: $6.49

A World Beyond Physics
The Emergence and Evolution of Life

Author: Stuart A. Kauffman

Narrator: Bob Souer

Unabridged: 3 hr 44 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/08/2019


Synopsis

Among the estimated one hundred billion solar systems in the known universe, evolving life is surely abundant. That evolution is a process of "becoming" in each case. Since Newton, we have turned to physics to assess reality. But physics alone cannot tell us where we came from, how we arrived, and why our world has evolved past the point of unicellular organisms to an extremely complex biosphere.

Building on concepts from his work at the Santa Fe Institute, Kauffman focuses in particular on the idea of cells constructing themselves and introduces concepts such as "constraint closure." Living systems are defined by the concept of "organization" which has not been focused on in enough in previous works. Cells are autopoetic systems that build themselves: they literally construct their own constraints on the release of energy into a few degrees of freedom that constitutes the very thermodynamic work by which they build their own self creating constraints. Living cells are "machines" that construct and assemble their own working parts. The emergence of such systems-the origin of life problem-was probably a spontaneous phase transition to self-reproduction in complex enough prebiotic systems. The resulting protocells were capable of Darwin's heritable variation, hence open-ended evolution by natural selection.

About Stuart A. Kauffman

Stuart Kauffman is a medical doctor, theoretical biologist, and complex systems researcher. He has held professorships at the University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in evolutionary biology in 1987. He is the author of multiple seminal works including The Origins of Order, At Home in the Universe, Investigations, and Humanity in a Creative Universe.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Charlene on February 01, 2020

This is an important book to read. I disagree with so much of what Kauffman said in this book but, imo, this subject matter is among the most important topics a scientist can study right now. The most intriguing idea to come out of this book and this lecture [URL not allowed] is the idea th......more

Goodreads review by Morgan on August 10, 2021

Stuart Kauffman observes that physics often accounts for what is, without accounting for how it got that way. And how it got that way is actually really really important to account for. Particularly when you’re talking about the origins of life. Kauffman posits that life originated as an autocatalytic......more

Goodreads review by Rama on March 01, 2020

The Cosmic Song: Life, matter, energy, order and non-equilibrium thermodynamics How did matter (non-life), a non-machine-like existence turned into a living cell (life) 3.8 billion years ago? Living cells are "machines" that construct and assemble their own working parts. The emergence of such syste......more

Goodreads review by AlexBlokhuis on September 02, 2024

It is quick, concise, with an interesting style to it. It makes difficult concepts more intuitive and elegant. This would normally lead me to give 4 to 5 stars. Intellectually, I find that the book could use some nuance, be more precise and be a bit more balanced in the representation of the work of......more

Goodreads review by Otto on April 03, 2020

Brevity matters. You don't need a thousand pages when you write in dense poetry. Kauffman's short book is an accessible and stylistic account of how complexity evolves into self-replicating molecules and ultimately life forms. It serves as a good introduction to complexity biology and to some of the......more