Summary of Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 The Western mind has lost paradise, which was the first home of humanity. We have been told that purpose and value are ours alone to create, without Satan and God.

#2 The rise of science and the technological explosion has driven us to our secular worldview. We still have a spiritual hunger, however, and we must find anew our place in the universe.

#3 The story of our loss of paradise is familiar, but it is worth repeating. Until Copernicus, we believed ourselves to be at the center of the universe. But after Newton, the laws of mechanics not only derived tides and orbits, but unleashed on the Western mind a clockwork universe.

#4 The theory of evolution by natural selection, which Darwin introduced, shattered the belief that species are fixed by the squares of Linnean taxonomy. They evolve from one another. Natural selection acting on random variation, not God or some principle of Rational Morphology, accounts for the similarity of limb and fin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822526075

IRB Media

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Insights on Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 11

Insights from Chapter 12

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The Western mind has lost paradise, which was the first home of humanity. We have been told that purpose and value are ours alone to create, without Satan and God.

#2

The rise of science and the technological explosion has driven us to our secular worldview. We still have a spiritual hunger, however, and we must find anew our place in the universe.

#3

The story of our loss of paradise is familiar, but it is worth repeating. Until Copernicus, we believed ourselves to be at the center of the universe. But after Newton, the laws of mechanics not only derived tides and orbits, but unleashed on the Western mind a clockwork universe.

#4

The theory of evolution by natural selection, which Darwin introduced, shattered the belief that species are fixed by the squares of Linnean taxonomy. They evolve from one another. Natural selection acting on random variation, not God or some principle of Rational Morphology, accounts for the similarity of limb and fin.

#5

The existence of spontaneous order is a challenge to our Darwinian worldview. If the forms of organisms were generated by laws of complexity, then selection has always had a handmaiden. It is not the sole source of order, and organisms are not just tinkered-together contraptions.

#6

The Darwinian worldview will not be easy to change. Biologists have, so far, no framework in which to study an evolutionary process that combines both self-organization and selection.

#7

The second law of thermodynamics, which states that in equilibrium systems, entropy inevitably increases, has been thought to be rather gloomy. But it is not so mysterious after all. In equilibrium systems, order tends to disappear because the system tends to randomly visit all its microstates.

#8

The first signs of life on earth are present 3. 45 billion years ago, 300 million years after the crust cooled enough to support liquid water. These signs of life are hardly trivial. Well-formed cells, or what the experts believe are cells, are present in the archaic rocks from that period.

#9

The first cells were invented about 3 billion boring years ago. They were simple single-celled organisms, and later, elongated tubelike cells that were precursors of early fungi. These progenitors of all later ecosystems formed complex local economies in which bacterial species and algae competed with one another.

#10

Life on earth has been dominated by single-celled organisms for the last 3 billion years. But life-forms were destined to change by some unknown agency. Multicellular organisms appeared by perhaps 800 million years ago.

#11

The history of life in the first 100 million years following the Cambrian explosion was one of bustling confusion. The Linnean chart groups organisms hierarchically, from the specific to the general: species, genera, families, orders, classes, phyla, and kingdoms. But nature suddenly sprang forth with many wildly different body plans in the Cambrian explosion.

#12

The past 550 million years have seen well-fossilized life-forms emerge onto and then fade from the stage. Speciation and extinction go hand in hand. The average diversity of species increased to a sort of rough steady state over the next 100 million years, but was constantly perturbed by small and large avalanches of extinctions.

#13

The natural history of life for the past 550 million years has echoes at all levels: from