Stuart Kauffman: Quotes about life

Stuart Kauffman is American biophysicist. Explore interesting quotes on life.
Stuart Kauffman: 28 quotes0 likes

“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”

Stuart Kauffman

Source: At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (1996), p.50 as cited in: Gert Korthof (1998)

“In his famous book, What is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger asks, "What is the source of the order in biology?" He arrives at the idea that it depends upon quantum mechanics and a microcode carried in some sort of aperiodic crystal—which turned out to be DNA and RNA—so he is brilliantly right. But if you ask if he got to the essence of what makes something alive, it's clear that he didn't. Although today we know bits and pieces about the machinery of cells, we don't know what makes them living things. However, it is possible that I've stumbled upon a definition of what it means for something to be alive.
For the better part of a year and a half, I've been keeping a notebook about what I call autonomous agents. An autonomous agent is something that can act on its own behalf in an environment. Indeed, all free-living organisms are autonomous agents. Normally, when we think about a bacterium swimming upstream in a glucose gradient we say that the bacterium is going to get food. That is to say, we talk about the bacterium teleologically, as if it were acting on its own behalf in an environment. It is stunning that the universe has brought about things that can act in this way. How in the world has that happened?”

Stuart Kauffman

The Adjacent Possible: A Talk with Stuart Kauffman, 2003

“If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order. Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.”

Stuart Kauffman

Source: At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (1996), p.112

“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.”

Stuart Kauffman

Stuart A. Kauffman (2010) Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. p.40