Stuart A. Kauffman > Quotes

“Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms. The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants exhibit this remarkable pattern. Organisms do the strangest things, but all these odd things need not reflect selection or historical accident. Some of the best efforts to understand phyllotaxis appeal to a form of self-organization. Paul Green, at Stanford, has argued persuasively that the Fibonacci series is just what one would expects as the simplest self-repeating pattern that can be generated by the particular growth processes in the growing tips of the tissues that form sunflowers, pinecones, and so forth. Like a snowflake and its sixfold symmetry, the pinecone and its phyllotaxis may be part of order for free”
― Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity

“If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.”
― Stuart Kauffman

“History enters when the space of the possible is vastly larger than the space of the actual.”
― Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

“The past three centuries of science have been predominantly reductionist, attempting to break complex systems into simple parts, and those parts, in turn, into simpler parts. The reductionist program has been spectacularly successful, and will continue to be so. But it has often left a vacuum: How do we use the information gleaned about the parts to build up a theory of the whole? The deep difficulty here lies in the fact that the complex whole may exhibit properties that are not readily explained by understanding the parts. The complex whole, in a completely nonmystical sense, can often exhibit collective properties, “emergent” features that are lawful in their own right. This”
― Stuart A. Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity

“This web of life, the most complex system we know of in the universe, breaks no law of physics, yet is partially lawless, ceaselessly creative.”
― Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

“We are agents who alter the unfolding of the universe.”
― Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

“A central failure of the “mind as a computational system” theory is that computations, per se, are devoid of meaning.”
― Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

“But Laplace’s particles in motion allow only happenings. There are no meanings, no values, no doings.”
― Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

“history itself arises out of the adjacent possible.”
― Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

“And to come back to the economy for a moment, the lifetime distribution of firms is also a power law. Now”
― Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

“Yet the biosphere constructs itself, evolves, and has persisted for 3.8 billion years.”
― Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

“Thus we can accept the wonderful results of the neuroscientists, accept that the mind, via neural behavior, is classically causal, and refuse the conclusion that the mind is computing an algorithm.”
― Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

“In short, given continuous spacetime, there are a second-order infinity of possible histories of the biosphere.”
― Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

“The biosphere explodes in diversity, creating more and more cracks in the floor of Darwin’s nature until the cracks, ever expanding, become the very floor of nature, and nature herself.”
― Stuart A. Kauffman, A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life

“nonergodic”
― Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

“We will talk of these things, for there is more to know than we know and more to say than we can say.”
― Stuart A. Kauffman, A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life

“I need not to show you the incapacity to predict in deterministic chaotic systems is emphatically not the same as the failure to prestate or predict Darwinian preadaptations. in the deterministic chaotic case, we know beforehand the state space of the system, in the simplest case, three continuous variables and their ranges. But in sharp contrast, we do not know beforehand the state space, or sample space, of the evolving biosphere and the emergence in the nonergodic universe of swim bladders.”
― Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion