Stuart Kauffman

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Stuart Alan Kauffman (born September 28, 1939) is a theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher, who has given much thought to the origin of life on Earth. 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.

Kauffman presently holds a joint appointment at the University of Calgary in Biological Sciences and in Physics and Astronomy. He is also an iCORE chair.

He graduated from Dartmouth in 1960, was awarded the BA(Hons) by Oxford University in 1963, and completed a medical degree (M.D.) at the University of California, San Francisco in 1968. After a brief medical career, he moved into developmental genetics, holding appointments first at the University of Chicago, then at the University of Pennsylvania from 1975 to 1995, where he rose to Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics. Kauffman held a MacArthur Fellowship, 1987-1992.

Kauffman rose to prominence through his association with the Santa Fe Institute (a non-profit research institute dedicated to the study of complex systems), where he was faculty in residence from 1986 to 1997, and through his work on models in various areas of biology. These included autocatalytic sets in origin of life research, gene regulatory networks in developmental biology, and fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology.

Some fellow biologists working in Kauffman's area reserve judgement 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.

In 1996, Kauffman started BiosGroup, a Santa Fe, New Mexico-based for-profit company that employs complex systems methodology to attempt to solve business problems. BiosGroup was acquired by NuTech Solutions in early 2003. As of 2003, Kauffman was a director of NuTech.

[edit] Selected publications

1991 (August), "Antichaos and Adaptation," Scientific American.
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. Oxford University Press. Popular treatment of many of the ideas in Origins. ISBN 0-19-511130-3
2000. Investigations. Oxford University Press. Speculative definitions of life. ISBN 0-19-512105-8
2004, Prolegomenon to a General Biology in William A. Dembski, Michael Ruse, eds., Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-82949-6
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.