At Home in the Universe - Stuart Kauffman

In 'At Home in the Universe - The Search for the Laws of Complexity', Stuart Kauffman sets out to restore our 'sense of the sacred' that modern science has eroded. He refutes the traditional idea that life emerges as a single celled organism from nonliving matter in an almost impossibly unlikely chance collision of exactly the correct molecules configured in exactly the right way. Instead he argues that it is almost inevitable that life will naturally 'crystallise' as an emergent phenomenon given the laws of chemistry and a large enough supply of basic chemicals. He describes biological evolution, not merely as survival of the fittest, but as a ...