“How did everything get to be so complicated? For most people,
a rueful exclamation; for Stuart Kauffman, the most interesting
question about the universe.” A review of Investigations:

Kauffman’s approach to explaining how such things can be is
unconventional. A philosopher turned doctor turned theoretical
biologist, he works out of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico,
where the house style is computer simulation of just about
anything. In his last book, At Home in the Universe , he outlined
the power of self-organisation, arguing that there are laws that
can generate order where we don’t expect it. In Kauffman’s
computer-generated universe, stable structures appeared where
intuition predicted a mess. Wherever he looked – in networks of
interacting genes, in vats of chemicals or in the patterns of
decision that tie producers to consumers in the marketplace –
he saw “order for free”.

In Investigations, one puzzle he wants to cast in a new light is
how to read the energy exchanges that underpin all these
processes.

…The book
is undeniably heavy going in places. Some of the chapters take
for granted science that another writer would explain at length.
Although there are plenty of concrete examples, much of the
core argument keeps trying to turn back into mathematics. Yet
Kauffman’s obsessive probing of the limits of understanding is
pretty gripping, in its way. The book may be science. It may be,
as he suggests hopefully, proto-science. It is certainly a crash
course in how to think like Stuart Kauffman, which is a great
way to see blind spots in the science that already exists. The Guardian