Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity by Stuart Kauffman ISBN: 0-19-511130-3 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: October, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.07 (54 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Content is okay, writing style is awful
Comment: I am always happy when I finish a book. The first reason could be that the book was good, and it left somewhat smarter than before. The other case is because the book was not so good and I am happy no to read it any longer. Unfortunately, this book belongs to the second category. Unfortunately, really, because the subject and the hypothesis developped in "At Home In The Universe" definitly deserve a better treatment.
I was brought to this book by the excellent "Here Be Dragons" (by S. Levay and D. Koerner ), which had a complete chapter on self-organization theories and the origins of life. Based on this captivating first glimpse into the world of artificial life experiments, I decided that the book by Kauffman was worth a try. Well...
First, the good news: the book does explain all the generalities and details on self-organization and the possible applications, from the origins of life to economics and politics. The ideas are very innovative, and even if those theories may not correctly explain everything (a possibility wisely pointed out by the author), they do add something new and worth exploring. The chapters on autocatalytic chemical sets are the most interesting, and convinced me that luck and Darwinian evolution do not completely explain why life exists, and how it achieved such a complexity.
Now, the bad news. The writing style is a killer: egocentric, prophetic, repetitive, grandiloquent and lyrical. Egocentric, because the author keeps on talking at the first person, which is annoying and useless. Prophetic, because the author believes too much in the ultimate success of his own theories. Repetitive because having ten or more paragraphs in a row explaining the exact same thing again and again cannot be qualified differently. Grandiloquent and lyrical can be good when Sagan does it, but most of the time it's just clumsy. With this book, you will go even lower: ridicule.
Conclusion: 3 stars: 4 stars for the ideas and 1 star for the style. The subject deserves a better treatment. So, if someone knows of another book on the subject, please, contact me.
Rating: 5
Summary: A brave view on how we got here
Comment: This book takes a hard look at how life on earth came to be. Rather than buy into the idea that somehow life evolved via the "blind watchmaker" scenario (i.e., similar to the argument that an army of monkeys sitting at typewriters would eventually compose a great novel), Stuart Kauffman builds a terrific case that the ingredients essential to life are bound to the rules that govern complex adaptive systems. And the very presence of these rules send a strong signal that "we the living", are "we the intended."
The author's conviction to both his argument and the science of complex systems is evident throughout the book. If you are coming to this book without much background in complex adaptive systems, you will not be short-changed here. In fact, Kauffman provides extremely rich examples with numerous simple diagrams to educate the reader as he builds his case. Considering the book was published some 7 years ago, I was surprised to see the concept of gene networks given so much attention in the text. Seeing how the latest trend in genomics research is looking at genes and proteins as a regulatory network and attempting to identify specific disease pathways, the science in this book is extremely relevant.
Rating: 5
Summary: Fantastic and enlightening
Comment: This particular book is a fantastic revelation and study of the boundary between order and chaos as it applies to the evolution of life, culture, technology and anything else in the universe. Its goal is to seek a universal law regarding the emergence of order in what we've traditionally considered unordered or random sets of fundamental stuff. For example, one of the observations that it makes is that evolution as Darwin revealed it is by itself not a sufficient explanation (scientifically) for why and how creatures like us could be here at all. In other words, natural selection is not sufficient to accomplish what life has accomplished in this world of ours. It needed the help of a very important other "force"... the life force, I might call it, and to which I've alluded many times in many forms through my writings. It's that special something about the nature of the universe that brings about the cooperation of systems, the autocatalytic closure which makes "hanging together" and "existing" some sort of "goal" deeply encoded in the nature of it all. You might be able to see how I might identify these ideas very closely with that term "lifetoward". What goal-oriented force brought life to be and continues to make life strive for ever more order and complexity? This book answers I think very well with: it's not a force, per se, but rather a fundamental aspect of the basic nature of the universe. To quote the book, "We the expected." We as living beings belong here and are an integral part of an incredibly awe inspiring process of creation of meaning and order in a world aching to give birth to it. The book closes with a nice summary, which much like a message I had posted to the [email protected] list some time ago, extols the development of a new and enlightened faith, based on a realization of the wonder of the way the universe deeply is and how we are in it.
In terms of the meaning and importance of this book, I would recommend it to everyone. However, I will warn you that it may be a significant challenge to read. It calls on a deeply considered understanding of a variety of disciplines, including most notably evolutionary biology, organic chemistry, mathematics, anthropology, and economics. It proceeds with an assumption that the reader has realized or can quickly recognize the common ground between these different areas of study. It uses a lot of mathematical models and visualizations of 2, 3 and hyperdimensional spaces to discuss the nature of this common law and its emergence in the world around us.
 |
Title: Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity by John H. Holland, Heather Mimnaugh ISBN: 0201442302 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: September, 1996 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
 |
Title: COMPLEXITY: THE EMERGING SCIENCE AT THE EDGE OF ORDER AND CHAOS by Mitchell M. Waldrop ISBN: 0671872346 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 15 January, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
Title: Investigations by Stuart A. Kauffman ISBN: 0195121058 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: July, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
 |
Title: Emergence: From Chaos to Order (Helix Books) by John H. Holland ISBN: 0738201421 Publisher: Perseus Book Group Pub. Date: April, 1999 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
 |
Title: The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution by Stuart A. Kauffman, Kaufman ISBN: 0195079515 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: May, 1993 List Price(USD): $49.50 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
