A World Beyond Physics — Stuart Kauffman on Life and Complexity

A World Beyond Physics — Stuart Kauffman on Life, Complexity, and Order

Wings, tentacles, and hearts

Why do complex things exist? Why do dragonflies have wings, octopuses have tentacles, and humans have hearts? Why do insect colonies, animal communities, and rich ecosystems spring about? The answer, as you can guess, is a tad circular. The living things that exist and endure are the things that survive, adapt, and propagate. And the complex functions that persist are the functions that assist with successful living.

In nature, technology, and economics, we also have what Stuart Kauffman calls, in his book A World Beyond Physics, an “autopoietic, collectively autocatalytic” system: systems that drive their own complexity and diversity upward. The process, while haphazard, is intuitive: as a species, invention, or industry comes into being, their very existence presents new niches for others, which in turn creates more niches, opening up the “adjacent possible” for everyone involved.

[1] Autopoietic systems are able to produce and maintain themselves. Reactions and events in autocatalytic systems, meanwhile, become catalysts for even more reactions and events, as we’ll soon describe. In this way, autopoiesis and autocatalysis, along with heritable variation and natural selection, might be thought of as the spices of life.

Niches and the adjacent possible

Such systems are everywhere. Rainforests, for starters, are a melting pot of niches and interdependencies—a complex web of producers (plants, trees), consumers (sloths, toucans, monkeys), predators (jaguars, anacondas), and decomposers (insects, mushrooms, microorganisms). Even the human body, which is home to around 90 trillion microbes, “is a walking ecosystem.”

The same is similarly true of our social, cultural, and technological systems. Genre upon genre can be found in art, music, dance, and fashion; just as we find communities within communities inside religions, social media, academia, and industry. Each, in their being, creates room for something new and more.

Of course, none of these examples are simple runaway processes. When nature or society selects something new, they tend to displace or replace something else in turn. The automobile, for example, was a boon for roadworks, oil and gas, and suburban living. But they killed the horse and buggy in its wake.

“The “floor of Nature” expands, housing ever more room after room that we jointly co-create faster than we all come into existence. And that is how complexity emerges… Much of the becoming of the biosphere has to do with making it possible. The same is true of the evolving economy… Each stage in that evolution begets the next stage.”
Stuart Kauffman. (2019). A World Beyond Physics.

Context-dependent filigreed games

Living complexity and diversity comes in part by way of ‘exaptation’, in which nature or humans apply existing models or know-how to new functions. Kauffman notes, for example, that our “middle ear bones, incus, malleus, and stapes evolved as exaptations from the jawbones of early fish.” Similarly, Raghu Garud and colleagues explain that “feathers emerged to provide thermoregulation”, but “were later co-opted for catching insects… [and later] co-opted [again] for flight.”

Kauffman argues that Richard Dawkin’s description of the ‘selfish gene’—“that evolution is a more or less brutal race for the survival of genes, and further, that organisms are merely the vehicles that carry the genes to be selected”—is incomplete. It neglects all the wonderful niches and possibilities that organisms unwittingly cocreate together in their brutal struggle for life. From another standpoint, life is a context-dependent ‘filigreed game’, “organisms are selected, [while] genes go along for the ride.”

Disorder and self-construction

But how exactly does life go about this? The second law of thermodynamics reminds us, after all, that in a closed system, disorder (or entropy) will rise with time. As Kauffman explains, “the second law insists that entropy tends to increase as a system flows from less to more probable macrostates…, like a cube of ice melting to a puddle.”

Living systems, however, are “open, non-equilibrium systems [that] reproduce.” Life takes free energy from our charitable sun to do thermodynamic work like photosynthesis. Without getting into the nitty-gritty, Kauffman says that three closures—constraint-, work cycle-, and catalytic-closures—enable living systems to accumulate order faster than entropy might degrade them.

These processes are not dissimilar to cylinder and piston interactions in engineering. As “expanding gas does work on the piston to move it in the cylinder”, the cylinder acts as a constraint to “channel the release of energy into work… As a result, the increase in entropy is less than [what would have been had] the constraints not [been] there”, Kauffman explains.² And more than machines, life contains the instructions to construct itself. “Given heritable variation and natural selection of protocells and beyond, the creatures of the burgeoning biosphere build themselves upward into the complexity that they mutually create.”

[2] This doesn’t mean, however, that engineers have beaten the second law of thermodynamics with pistons and cylinders. The engineer, after all, has to expend energy and materials to build the contraption. And where did the engineer come from? As Seth Lloyd writes, “nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics.”

Unprestatable possibilities

Of course, “most complex things will never get to exist.” As life traverses the adjacent possible, other nodes on this foggy sea of possibilities are closed off. It is what physicists call a non-ergodic process. History and chance matters.

What’s more, evolution is, in Kauffman’s assessment, unprestatable. You could not have said 3.5 billion years ago, for example, when life on Earth first began, that the ultra violent, planet destroying, empire building Homo sapiens would rise from a relatively marginal existence to dominate the world. You wouldn’t have been able to prestate it. Nor could you build a reliable model or equation of it.

Similarly, our farming societies and bureaucratic empires were very much dependent on the existence of several domesticable crops and animals. How likely is it for domesticates to remerge should life begin again? Can you imagine the scenes for humanity if food production never got underway? We have only begun to chip away at the monolith of unknowing.

Do dice play god?

But while we might not be able to predict the details of evolutionary history, there might be general statements that we can make. Eyes, ears, wings, and legs, for example, appear generally useful and nature seems to have evolved them many times over. If life started anew, how much money would you bet on such traits emerging once again in some form or another? Perhaps something similar can be said about intelligence.

As mathematician Ian Stewart points out in Do Dice Play God, it’s important to distinguish between unpredictable weather-like trajectories, and predictable climate-like attractors over the long run. However, what is knowable in principle versus what is predictable in practice are often two different things. Biologists and economists have their work cut out for them.

As Kauffman writes:

“We stumble into the world we make possible as we lumber forward, with no or little insight or foreknowledge… We think that in physics—Special and General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory with the Standard Model—we will find the foundations from which we can derive the world, the ultimate becoming. We cannot. The ultimate may rest on the foundations, but it is not derivable from them. This ultimate, an unknowable unfolding, slips its foundational moorings and floats free. As Heraclitus said, the world bubbles forth.”
Stuart Kauffman. (2019). A World Beyond Physics.

Sources and further reading

Kauffman, Stuart. (2019). A World Beyond Physics.
Keynes, John Maynard. (1923). The Tract on Monetary Reform.
Stewart, Ian. (2019). Do Dice Play God?