At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity

An exciting exploration of a new scientific paradigm, At Home in the Universe provides stunning insights into the origin of life, the development of embroyos, genetic engineering, the evolution of economic and cultural systems, and much more. We all know of instances of spontaneous order such as the shape of a snowflake, but Kauffman argues that self-organization is a great undiscovered principle of nature. But how does this spontaneous order arise? Kauffman contends that complexity itself triggers self-organization, or what he calls "order for free". If enough different molecules pass a certain threshold of complexity, they begin to self-organize into a new entity--for instance, a living cell.

Stuart Kauffman is a member of the Santa Fe Institute. A MacArthur Fellowship recipient, he is the leading thinker on self-organization and the science of complexity as applied to biology.