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"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"
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Stuart KauffmanAs I thought about this, I noted that the bacterium is just a physical — Stuart Kauffman
"As I thought about this, I noted that the bacterium is just a physical system; its 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."
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Stuart Kauffman
Stuart Kauffman
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Stuart Alan Kauffman is an American medical doctor, theoretical biologist, and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. He was a professor at the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Calgary. He is currently emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and affiliate faculty at the Institute for Systems Biology. He h
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"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."
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Stuart KauffmanQuote
"Living systems exist in the solid regime near the edge of chaos, and natural selection achieves and sustains such a poised state."
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Stuart KauffmanQuote
"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."
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Stuart KauffmanQuote
"Stephen Jay Gould is extremely bright, inventive. He thoroughly understands paleontology; he thoroughly understands evolutionary biology. He has performed an enormous service in getting people to think about punctuated equilibrium, because you see the process of stasis/sudden change, which is a puzzle. Its the cessation of change for long periods of time. Since you always have mutations, why dont things continue changing? You either have to say that the particular form is highly adapted, optimal, and exists in a stable environment, or you have to be very puzzled. Steve has been enormously important in that sense. Talking with Steve, or listening to him give a talk, is a bit like playing tennis with someone whos better than you are. It makes you play a better game than you can play. For years, Steve has wanted to find, in effect, what accounts for the order in biology, without having to appeal to selection to explain everything—that is, to the evolutionary "just-so stories." You can come up with some cockamamie account about why anything you look at was formed in evolution because it was useful for something. There is no way of checking such things. Were natural allies, because Im trying to find sources of that natural order without appealing to selection, and yet we all know that selection is important."
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Stuart KauffmanQuote
"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."
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Stuart Kauffman