Stuart Kauffman Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

It would be a triumph to find universal laws of organization for life, ecosystems, and biospheres. The candidate criticality law is emergent and not reducible to physics alone.

Stuart Kauffman
Paradise has been lost, not to sin, but to science.

Stuart Kauffman
Algorithms are a set of procedures to generate the answer to a problem. An example is the algorithm to find the solution to a quadratic equation, which most of us were taught while learning algebra. Not only was I taught the algorithm, but our entire class was invited to tattoo it on our stomachs so that we could solve quadratic equations by rote.

Stuart Kauffman
A couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine are, in real fact, a couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine, not mere particles in motion.

Stuart Kauffman
Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the sere Earth some 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave.

Stuart Kauffman
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

Stuart Kauffman
The onset of evolutionism brought with it the concept of branching phylogenies. The branching image, so clear and succinct, has come to underlie all our thinking about organisms and evolution.

Stuart Kauffman
The famous physicist Wolfgang Pauli is said to have remarked that the deepest pleasure in science comes from finding an instantiation, a home, for some deeply felt, deeply held image.

Stuart Kauffman
Evolution is not just "chance caught on the wing". It is not just a tinkering of the ad hoc, of bricolage, of contraption. It is emergent order honored and honed by selection.

Stuart Kauffman
Deep in the chaotic regime, slight changes in structure almost always cause vast changes in behavior. Complex controllable behavior seems precluded.

Stuart Kauffman
Living systems exist in the solid regime near the edge of chaos, and natural selection achieves and sustains such a poised state.

Stuart Kauffman
Life does not depend on the magic of Watson-Crick base pairing or any other specific template-replicating machinery. Life lies... in the property of catalytic closure among a collection of molecular species

Stuart Kauffman
Francisco Varela is amazingly inventive, freewheeling, and creative. There's a lot of depth in what he and Humberto Maturana have said. Conversely, from the point of view of a tied-down molecular biologist, this is all airy-fairy, flaky stuff. Thus there's the mixed response. That part of me that's tough-minded and critical is questioning, but the other part of me has cottoned on to the recent stuff he's doing on self- representation in immune networks. I love it.

Stuart Kauffman
The strange thing about the theory of evolution is that everyone thinks he understands it. But we do not. A biosphere, or an econosphere, self-consistently coconstructs itself according to principles we do not yet fathom.

Stuart Kauffman
As I thought about this, I noted that the bacterium is just a physical system; it's just a bunch of molecules that hang together and do things to one another. So, I wondered, what characteristics are necessary for a physical system to be an autonomous agent? After thinking about this for a number of months I came up with a tentative definition.
My definition is that an autonomous agent is something that can both reproduce itself and do at least one thermodynamic work cycle. It turns out that this is true of all free-living cells, excepting weird special cases. They all do work cycles, just like the bacterium spinning its flagellum as it swims up the glucose gradient. The cells in your body are busy doing work cycles all the time.

Stuart Kauffman
It is not necessary that a specific set of 2000 enzymes be assembled... Whenever a collection of chemicals contains enough different kinds of molecules, a metabolism will crystallize from the broth.

Stuart Kauffman
One of the most important presuppositions of Darwin's entire thesis is gradualism, the idea that mutations to the genome can cause minor variations in the organism's properties, which can be accumulated piecemeal, bit by bit, over the eons to create the complex order found in the organisms we observe.

Stuart Kauffman