Stuart Kauffman

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Stuart Kauffman bigraphy, stories - Biologists

Stuart Kauffman : biography

September 28, 1939 –

Stuart Alan Kauffman (born September 28, 1939) is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth.

In 1971, Kauffman proposed the self-organized emergence of collectively autocatalytic sets of polymers, specifically peptides, for the origin of molecular reproduction.Kauffman, S. A. (1971) Cellular Homeostasis, Epigenesis, and Replication in Randomly Aggregated Macromolecular Systems. Journal of Cybernetics 1, 71- 96Kauffman, SA (2011) . Life. 1(1), 34-48; Reproducing peptide, DNA, and RNA collectively autocatalytic sets have now been made experimentally.Dadon Z, Wagner N, Ashkenasy G (2008) "The Road to Non-Enzymatic Molecular Networks" Angew. Chem. Int. 47, 6128.Dadon Z, Wagner N, Cohen-Luria R, and Ashkenasy G. (2012) Reaction Networks. In: Ed. Gale PA and Steed JW. Supramolecular Chemistry: From Molecules to Nanomaterials. John Wiley and Sons, Ltd. ISBN 978-0-470-74640-0. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as well as for applying models of Boolean networks to simplified genetic circuits. His hypotheses stating that cell types are attractors of such networks, and that genetic regulatory networks are "critical", have found experimental support.Huang, S. and Kauffman, S. A. (2009) Complex Gene Regulatory Networks – from Structure to Biological Observables: Cell Fate Determination. Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science, Editor : R. A. Meyers, Book Title: Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science,Publisher: Springer,ISBN: ISBN 978-0-387-75888-6Nykter, M., Price, N. D., Aldana, M., Ramsey, S. A., Kauffman, S. A., Hood, L., Yli-Harja, O. and Shmulevich, I. (2008) Gene Expression Dynamics in the Macrophage Exhibit Criticality. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105(6): 1897-1900

Publications

Select bibliography

  • 1993, Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, Oxford University Press, Technical monograph. ISBN 0-19-507951-5
  • 1995, At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. Oxford University Press.
  • 2000, Investigations. Oxford University Press.
  • 2008, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. [Basic Books] – ISBN 0-465-00300-1

Selected articles

  • 1969, "Metabolic stability and epigenesis in randomly constructed genetic nets," in: Journal of Theoretical Biology, 22:437–467, 1969.
  • 1991, "," in: Scientific American, August 1991.
  • 2004, "Prolegomenon to a General Biology", in William A. Dembski, Michael Ruse, eds., Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, Cambridge University Press.
  • 2004, "Autonomous Agents", in John D. Barrow, P.C.W. Davies, and C.L. Harper Jr., eds., Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology, and Complexity, Cambridge University Press.

About Stuart Kauffman

  • MacKenzie, Dana (2002). , Discover Magazine, Vol. 23, No. 2, 59–63, February 2002.
  • Kauffman about Kauffman:
  • Goldstein, Jeffrey A. (2008). Book Review of "Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion", by Stuart Kauffman. In Emergence: Complexity & Organization, 10(3), 117–130.
  • Di Bernardo, M., I sentieri evolutivi della complessità biologica nell’opera di S. A. Kauffman, Mimesis, Milano 2011.

Work

Kauffman is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection.

Some biologists and physicists working in Kauffman’s area reserve judgment on Kauffman’s claims about self-organization and evolution. A case in point is the introduction to the 2002 book "Self Organization in Biological Systems". Roger Sansom’s Ingenious Genes: How Gene Regulation Networks Evolve to Control Development (MIT Press, 2011) is an extended criticism of Kauffman’s models. Kauffman’s recent work translates his biological findings to the mind body problem and issues in neuroscience, proposing attributes of a new "poised realm" that hovers indefinitely between quantum coherence and classicality. Kauffman published on this topic in Answering Descartes: Beyond Turing.Kauffman, S. (2012). "Answering Descartes: Beyond Turing" in The Once and Future Turing Eds Barry Cooper and Andrew Hodges. Cambridge University Press. With colleagues Giuseppe Longo and Maël Montévil, Stuart Kauffman wrote (January 2012) "No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere,"Longo G, Montévil M, and Kauffman S (2012) , which aims to show that evolution is not law entailed, as is physics, and that, without selection, evolution enables its own future possibilities.