Stuart A. Kauffman Readings
Excerpts from A World Beyond Physics & Reinventing the Sacred
RELEVANCE
Read and understand this. Then re-read it.
Kauffman takes a long time to understand, because he speaks very simply but is a master of complexity. I am just beginning to understand him.
Many of the ways we think of unpredictability and uncertainty in our investment process are explained by Kauffman. Our models of progress and innovation from Kauffman.
His language is very precise, even when he doesn’t seem to be. He uses words for their layered meaning using multiple layers of meaning at the same time. If you are tempted to see what he is saying as a sort of purple prose, stop - you missed a layer or two. Although creative beings in a creative universe sounds charming — he is doing a lot more with the phrase. For instance, can’t we model the diffusion of molecules and the diffusion of ideas with some of the same math? What role does diffusion play in “creativity” in different contexts?
Finally, his explanation that the world is not a machine is a needed refutation of all the Victorians and other determinists and reductivists in finance like the gentleman who runs the big hedge fund and write books on rules of the world and the economy as machine. Machine metaphors for living systems are of limited use.
There are numerous useful analytical structures within Kauffman’s descriptions – from Darwinian pre-adaptations to the adjacent possible. Pay attention for useful concepts.
Specifically, the readings below are from two of Kauffman’s books: Reinventing the Sacred and A World Beyond Physics.
[Emphasis in the passages below is ours.]
THE CYCLE OF WORK
Kauffman, Stuart A. Reinventing the Sacred.
An organized being is then not a mere machine, for that has merely moving power, but it possesses in itself formative power of a self-propagating kind, which it communicates to its materials though they have it not of themselves; it organizes them, in fact, and this cannot be explained by the mere mechanical faculty of motion. —Immanuel Kant
This quotation, from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, points to the subject matter of this chapter: propagating organization of processes. As we will see, the phenomena are real and right before our eyes. Nevertheless, we appear to lack an adequate theory of what we are looking at. It is said that the Native Americans witnessing the arrival of Columbus did not “see” his ships, for they had no categories of thought in which to place ships. Such is our situation now. Sometimes science advances by seeing things anew. The evolution of life has yielded astonishing organization that links complex, spontaneous and nonspontaneous processes of enormous intricacy. Part of our natural astonishment at life stems from this outrageous, complex organization of process….
With the wide flowering of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biochemistry, biophysics, and biology, you would think that we would already have the scientific concepts in hand to understand the life that lies before us, but we do not. The manifold web of organized processes we call the biosphere largely reflects natural selection and the evolution of this specific biosphere and hence, while not contravening physical laws, is not reducible to physics. In this chapter I explore a web of concepts, hinted at by Kant, that concern propagating organization of process. From the larger perspective of this book that seeks to move beyond reductionism to a scientific worldview of emergence and ceaseless creativity, the evolutionary emergence of overwhelming organization of process is the most visible example of a phenomenon that is in no way accessible to reductionism.
For the nonscientific reader, the present chapter is an example of the struggle in science to formulate questions that are still unclear. The attempt to “find” the needed concepts for propagating organization is an example of the requirement for imagination and even wonder in science. There appears to be no algorithm, or effective procedure, to find the concepts that we need. We do in fact live our lives forward, often without knowing, which requires all our evolved humanity, not just “knowledge.” …
The rise of molecular biology in the twentieth century brought to the study of living systems a focus on “information,” a concept that manages to be both restrictive and unclear. We have been enjoined to ignore energy, work, and other properties of cells and focus on the “information master molecules of life,” the genes, and the processes that genes control: transcription of RNA, translation to proteins, the differentiation of cells as they develop from the fertilized egg, and so forth. But “information,” particularly the one-way flow of information from DNA to RNA to proteins that remains molecular biology’s central dogma, is an inadequate framework for describing much of what we see in the cell.
Cell biologists, for instance, have been struggling to understand the behavior of organelles called mitotic spindles, where molecular motors attach to one or more molecules called microtubules, themselves able to grow and shrink. The motors race back and forth holding onto the microtubules, and upon reaching the ends, gather the microtubules into a variety of complex mechanical structures that, among other things, form the mitotic spindles that move daughter chromosomes in sets to the two daughter dividing cells such that each gets a full complement of chromosomes. Here it is clear that mechanical work is done, for the chromosomes are moved bodily to the appropriate daughter cells. More broadly, cells do some combination of mechanical, chemical, electrochemical, and other work, and work cycles in a web of propagating organization of processes that often link spontaneous and nonspontaneous processes. But the sorts of questions asked by molecular biology, with its emphasis on how one molecule “instructs” another, are of little help in understanding this web of propagating organization of processes and these work cycles….
THE NONERGODIC UNIVERSE
I now wish to discuss what will turn out, among other things, to be the physical foundation for much of the evolution of diversity in the biosphere, of economic growth and even human history. The present chapter lays the foundations for the two that follow, where I will argue that the evolution of the biosphere and economy and history are all ceaselessly creative in ways that we typically cannot foretell. Thus, not only are we beyond reductionism into a scientific worldview that includes “emergence,” we will see that we are coming to a scientific worldview that takes us into subjects normally thought to lie outside the realm of science.
At levels of complexity above atoms, the universe is on a pathway, or trajectory, that will never repeat. For example, in the evolution of the biosphere, from molecules to species, what arises is almost always unique in the history of the universe. Using the physicist’s technical term, the evolution of molecules and species in the biosphere is vastly nonrepeating, or nonergodic.
Now consider all possible proteins with a length of two hundred amino acids. Typical proteins inside you are about three hundred amino acids long, some several thousand amino acids long, so two hundred is conservative.
If there are twenty types of amino acids in biological proteins, how many proteins like this can there be? This is simple. At each position there are twenty choices, so the total number of possible proteins with a length of two hundred is twenty raised to the two hundredth power, or about 10260. Could all these proteins arise at least once in the history of our universe since the big bang? The answer is an overwhelming no. Only a miniscule fraction of these proteins can have been constructed in the history of this universe. Thus, as we will see, the proteins that come into existence in the evolution of the biosphere are typically unique—to use Luigi Luisi’s phrase, they are never-before-born proteins.
Consider this simple calculation. There are about 1080 particles in the known universe. Of course, these are widely separated from one another, but let’s ignore that inconvenient fact. Suppose all these particles were busy colliding and building nothing but unique, never-before-born proteins of length two hundred ever since the big bang. The universe is 1017 seconds old. Suppose it took 10-15 seconds, a femtosecond, a very fast chemical time scale, to make each protein.
It turns out that it would require 1067 repetitions of the entire history of the universe to create all possible proteins of length two hundred just once.
The fastest time scale in the universe is the Planck time scale, 10-43 seconds. If proteins of length two hundred were being built on the Planck time scale, it would not change the essential results: now it would take 1039 repetitions of the entire history of the universe to create all possible proteins length two hundred once.
This is quite profound. There is no way this universe could have created all possible proteins of length two hundred. The set that exists is a tiny subset of the possible. When a new protein is created, say via a mutation, it really is what Luisi happily calls a never-before-born protein. That is, as the biosphere advances into its chemical adjacent possible, it is persistently making unique molecules. Thus, as mutations occur so novel proteins are made, or new organic molecules are synthesized in evolution, the biosphere is persistently advancing into its adjacent possible. The adjacent possible is real. We are invading it much of the time.
The same uniqueness occurs at the level of the evolution of species, the human economy, of human history, and human culture. To put the matter simply: we will never explore all the possibilities. History enters when the space of the possible is vastly larger than the space of the actual. At these levels of complexity, the evolution of the universe is vastly nonergodic…
It is interesting that these features may apply not only to the biosphere but to other features of the abiotic universe. For example, in chapter 7, I mentioned the giant, cold molecular clouds, the birthplaces of stars, that drift through many galaxies. Complex chemistry occurs in these clouds. For all we know, they are expanding forever into their chemically adjacent possible. Grains that form in the clouds can serve as surface catalysts for further chemistry, new molecules may bind to the grains’ catalytic surfaces and modify the subsequent chemical reactions, hence the subsequent flow into the chemical adjacent possible. These grains aggregate up to the size of planetesimals. Almost certainly, they are unique on a grain level, so the giant clouds are almost certainly nonergodic.
Thus, at any level of complexity above atoms, from complex molecules upward, the universe cannot make all possible things in many repetitions of its own lifetime. While we are used to thinking of the second law as “the” arrow of time, this, too—the fact that the universe is nonergodic—is an arrow of time with respect to the time-reversibility of the fundamental laws of physics. I explore this issue further just below concerning “underpopulated vast chemical reaction graphs.” ….
…. Each time a novel specific set of new never-before-born molecules appear, they create a new adjacent possible into which these new molecules may in turn flow. Fluctuations almost certainly do not damp out. Instead, the specific fluctuations that drive the matter on the reaction graph in particular directions thereby open up new adjacent possible pathways to be explored, possibly creating ever new “salients” of actual molecules on the vast reaction graph. Certainly, the total equilibrium distribution of atoms on all possible molecular species in the graph never remotely recurs. History enters, even in this simple chemical reaction system….
Almost certainly, the way the system keeps entering its ever adjacent possible on the underpopulated vast reaction graph creates a nonuniform (more technically, non-isotropic) flow with extra flux in certain directions, which in turn tends statistically to keep wandering off in some historically and contingently biased and unique directions. Fluctuations almost certainly do not damp out. While this kind of chemical reaction system requires detailed study, when the total mass on the graph is tiny compared to the number of molecular species, these guesses seem plausible. In the vast complexity of the giant, cold molecular clouds in the galaxies, with their molecules and grains and planetesimals, something like this may be happening. If so, molecular diversity is exploding in our universe in ever unique ways.
The flow into the adjacent possible arises at levels of complexity above atoms, certainly for molecules, species, technologies, and human history. Here we must attend to the way the adjacent possible is entered. Salients are almost certainly created in specific “directions” in the space of possibilities, which in turn govern where the system can flow next into its new adjacent possible. These fluctuations almost certainly do not die out, but probably propagate in biased ways into the ever new adjacent possible. All this, as we shall see, applies to the human economy itself as one concrete case. As I shall discuss in detail in chapter 11, there is an economic web of goods and services, where each good has neighbors that are its complements and substitutes. The structure of the web creates ever new economic niches in its adjacent possible for never-before-born, new goods and services, such that economic diversity has expanded. The structure of the economic web partially governs its own growth and transformation.
Just possibly, as hinted in the last chapter, the biosphere and perhaps also the global economy enter the adjacent possible in such a way that the diversity of organized processes in the biosphere, or ways of making a living in both the biosphere and economy, is maximized. To state the matter both cautiously and boldly: Once we consider the nonergodic universe at these levels of complexity, and self-consistently self-constructing wholes like biospheres and a global economy, we are entitled to wonder whether there may be general laws that describe the overall features of such systems even if the details cannot be predicted.
We’re only beginning to see the implications of the nonergodicity of the universe. It is part of the persistent creativity in the universe, biosphere, economy, and history. Ceaseless creativity has become physically possible….
…
DARWINIAN PREADAPTATIONS
We have already discussed Darwinian adaptations as they relate to the heart. As I noted, the heart has several causal properties, including pumping blood and making heart sounds. In accounting for the pumping of blood as the “function” of the heart, we imagined Darwin telling us that it was by virtue of this causal property that hearts came into existence in the nonergodic universe. Now, armed with a few additional concepts, we can see that the evolution of the heart was a foray into the adjacent possible. More, the pumping of blood has causal consequences at the level of organisms and the future evolution of the biosphere. Hearts create salients in the adjacent possible that thereafter bias the way evolution occurs. Moreover, while the mechanisms of the heart betray no laws of physics, physics alone cannot predict the coming into existence in the universe of hearts with their structure and organization of processes, and with their specific causal powers. Thus, hearts are epistemologically and ontologically emergent with respect to physics. Without vitiating any law of physics, physical laws alone do not describe the causal unfolding of the universe. This is already a radical claim, but nothing compared to challenging the Galilean spell.
One of Darwin’s brilliant ideas is what is now called Darwinian preadaptation. Darwin noted that an organ, say the heart, could have causal features that were not the function of the organ and had no selective significance in its normal environment. But in a different environment, one of those causal features might come to have selective significance. By “preadapted” Darwin did not mean that some intelligence crafted the preadaptation. He simply meant that an incidental feature with no selective significance in one environment might turn out to have selective significance in another environment.
Preadaptations are abundant in biological evolution. When one occurs, typically, a novel functionality comes into existence in the biosphere—and thus the universe. The classic example concerns swim bladders in fish. These bladders, partially filled with air, partially with water, allow the fish to adjust their buoyancy in the water column. Paleontologists have traced the evolution of swim bladders from early fish with lungs. Some of these lived in oxygen-poor water. The lungs grow as outpouchings from the gut. The fish swallowed the oxygen-poor water, some of which entered the lungs, where air bubbles were absorbed, making it easier for the fish to survive. But now water and air were both in a single lung, and the lung was preadapted to evolve into a new function—a swim bladder that adjusted neutral buoyancy in the water column. With the evolution of the swim bladder a new function has entered the biosphere and universe—that of maintaining neutral buoyancy in a water column. This new function had causal consequences for the further evolution of the biosphere, the evolution of new species of fish and new, never-before-born proteins, and the coevolution of other species with these new species. So, the preadaptation changed the future evolution of the biosphere and physical content of the universe in the nonergodic universe above the level of atoms.
Now I come to my radical question. Do you think you could say ahead of time, or finitely pre-state, all possible Darwinian pre-adaptations of all species alive today? Or could you pre-state all possible human pre-adaptations?
I have found no one who believes the answer is yes. We all appear to believe the answer is no.
Part of the problem with attempting to pre-state, or specify ahead of time, all possible pre-adaptations is that to do so we would have to pre-state all possible selective environments. Yet we have not the faintest idea of what all possible selective environments might be. More formally, we have no way to list all possible selective environments with respect to all causal features of organisms. How would we even get started on creating such a list? Thus, we cannot know beforehand the Darwinian preadaptations that will come to exist in the biosphere. After the fact, once the preadaptation has developed some new functionality, we may well be able to identify it. For swim bladders, the new functionality was the capacity to achieve neutral buoyancy in a water column. Only retrospectively can we sometimes account for the emergence of preadaptations. Paleontologists do this all the time.
But our lack of prior knowledge does nothing to slow down the biosphere’s evolution. The profound implication of this is that virtually any feature or interconnected sets of features of an organism might, in the right selective environment, turn out to be a preadaptation and give rise to a novel functionality. Thus, the evolution of the biosphere is radically often un-pre-statable and unpredictable in its invasion of the adjacent possible on the unique trajectory that is its own biological evolution.
This has very important implications. Consider how Newton taught us to do science: pre-state the configuration space (say the billiard table); identify the variables, forces among them, and initial and boundary conditions; and solve the dynamical equations for the forward evolution of the system. But we cannot follow Newton’s mandate in the evolution of the biosphere, for the very deep reason that we do not know all the relevant variables beforehand. While we know the billiard balls on the table and the table with its boundaries, we do not know beforehand about swim bladders. Therefore, we cannot write down the equations among the variables and solve for the forward evolution of the biosphere the way we can for the balls on a billiard table. We are precluded from following Newton. The existence of Darwinian preadaptations means that Newton’s way of doing science stops when it comes to the forward evolution of the biosphere.
This, in turn, has implications for whether and to what extent the evolution of the biosphere is describable by “natural laws.” The status of laws in science has been much debated among scientists and philosophers of science. Are they in some metaphysical sense “real,” in the sense of prescriptively “governing” how things “must” unfold, or are they descriptions? With Nobel laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann, I adhere to the view that a law is a short, or compressed, description, available beforehand, of the regularities of the phenomenon it covers. But if we cannot pre-state, let alone predict, Darwinian preadaptations before they occur, and yet they occur, then we can have no law, in Gell-Mann’s sense of a law, for the evolution of the biosphere by Darwinian preadaptations. The same holds true, as we shall see, for the evolution of the economy or for the evolution of human culture. Then Darwinian preadaptations are literally partially lawless, though not in the sense that laws of physics are violated. An oxygen does not change to a nitrogen, but we cannot have a law-governed emergence of swim bladders. A more accurate way of saying this is that Darwinian preadaptations are not sufficiently covered by any natural law. Laws do still apply and are constraints. The oxygen really cannot change to nitrogen. But no natural law governs the emergence of swim bladders in the evolution of the biosphere.
I should stress that in saying that Darwinian preadaptations are not, apparently, law governed, I am not saying that the events that lead to the selection of a preadaptation in a novel environment may not be perfectly causal. That is, without invoking the probabilistic character of quantum mechanics, which may or may not play a role in the emergence of some preadaptations, there may well be perfectly good “classical physical” and biological reasons why and how swim bladders evolved from lungs. Indeed, multiple routes to the evolution of the swim bladder might all have been successful, even if evolution followed only one of these routes. This is another case of the “multiple platform” arguments. Not only can we not finitely pre-state all possible Darwinian preadaptations, also for any one, we cannot pre-state all possible pathways to its successful emergence in the biosphere. To say that Darwinian preadaptations may be classically caused but are not law governed is quite strange. Indeed, it is radical. Let us call such situations causally anomalous, using a phrase introduced by a philosopher of mind, Donald Davidson, to describe the relations of neural events to mental events. Causally anomalous phenomena are a huge departure from Laplace’s reductionism, in which the entire future and past of the universe could be known from the current specification of the positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe. Clearly, we are moving far beyond reductionism.
If the evolution of the biosphere is partially lawless, as I believe is the evolution of the economy and human history, we are beyond Galileo’s spell. It is not true, it begins to appear, that the unfoldings of the universe, biosphere, and human history are all fully describable by natural law. As we will see, this radical claim has, among its consequences, a radical and liberating creativity in the unfolding of the universe, biosphere, and human civilizations….
I come now to a difficult issue: can I prove that Darwinian preadaptations are partially lawless? I do not yet know how to do so. Moreover, it is not at all clear what could constitute such a proof. Let us look for a moment at Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Gödel showed that for any sufficiently rich mathematical system, such as arithmetic, there were statements that were true given the axioms of arithmetic, but that could not be deduced from those axioms. This theorem is stunning, of course. It shows, even for strictly mathematical systems, that they are persistently open in the precise sense that there are true, but not provable statements given the axioms of the systems. And if the true, but unprovable statements are added as new axioms, the enriched axiom set again has new true statements that cannot be deduced from the enriched axiom set. Mathematics itself is not “complete,” it is persistently open, as it, by adding new axioms, invades a mathematical adjacent possible.
In a loose sense, Darwinian preadaptations, adding novel functionalities to the biosphere and allowing it, thereby, to invade the physical adjacent possible in new ways in its further evolution, are analogous to mathematics invading the mathematical adjacent possible by adding unprovable statements as new axioms.
In two later chapters, on the economy and mind, I will argue that the analogues of Darwinian preadaptations arise and are not algorithmic. It is not at all clear how to prove that something is not algorithmic.
My claim that we cannot finitely pre-state Darwinian preadaptations does not pertain to a mathematical world of symbols and equations. It pertains to the real world of atoms and organisms. What could constitute a proof that such Darwinian preadaptations are partially lawless? You might argue that some such natural law might, somehow, be found. We are entering new scientific and philosophic ground, as far as I can tell. I do not know what would constitute a proof of my claim…. How then, if at all, could one prove that I am correct, that Darwinian preadaptations cannot be finitely pre-stated, hence are partially lawless? I can think of no way to do so. Then my way forward is to proceed as I have above, to try to show us that there is no effective procedure to list all causal consequences of parts of organisms and their potential uses, alone or together with other parts of the organism, in all possible selective environments that might arise. This may be all the proof that we can ever have that the evolution of the biosphere of the biosphere is partially lawless. My claim may, itself, be beyond proof.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE ECONOMY
Let us turn to human action. In this chapter, I will move beyond the “hard” sciences and show how the ceaseless creativity of the universe is manifested in a particular social realm, the realm of economics. Like the biosphere, our human realm is endlessly creative in ways that typically cannot be foretold. Our common incapacity to know beforehand what Darwinian preadaptation will bring to biological evolution has an analogue in technological evolution—we can easily apply the idea of preadaptation there, too—and more broadly in the evolution of the economy. Later in this chapter, I will discuss economic webs among goods and services, and show how that web creates novel niches for ever newer goods and services. The global economy has exploded from perhaps a hundred to a thousand goods fifty thousand years ago to an estimated 10 billion today. The economic web invades its adjacent possible.
Like the biosphere, the “econosphere” is a self-consistently co-constructing whole, persistently evolving, with small and large extinctions of old ways of making a living, and the persistent small and large avalanches of the emergence of new ways of making a living. Because there are economic analogues of preadaptations, I hope to persuade you that how the economy evolves is often not foreseeable. Despite this, the evolution of the economy often remains whole as it evolves and adapts. On a broader scale, the same self-consistent co-construction and adaptive evolution to that which is unforeseeable is true of our civilizations, including the global civilization that may well be emerging and which we will, as humans, partially co-construct.
This discussion is not only scientifically important but critical in the practical world. The structure of the economic web that I will describe below influences its role in driving economic growth. I will show here that the growth of the web is self-amplifying, or autocatalytic, and that—as data confirm—economic growth is positively correlated with economic diversity. The more diverse the economic web, the easier is the creation of still further novelty. This has practical implications. Despite successes in achieving economic growth in Asia, including China, India, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, and in eastern Europe including Russia, much of the world today still lives in poverty. Understanding the economic web and its modes of evolution may perhaps alleviate some of that poverty while achieving ecologically sustainable growth. I will argue here that there are severe limits to this ambition: our incapacity to predict technological evolution and other aspects of the evolving economy is an implicit condition of the creative universe. If we cannot extend science, Newtonian or otherwise, to the detailed evolution of the economic sphere, we must reexamine rationality in a broad framework. We must strive to understand how fully human agents manage to live their economic lives in the face of inescapable ignorance, thus where reason alone is an insufficient guide to our actions. We will have to re-examine how we use all the tools that we have evolved for 3.8 billion years, of cellular evolution, animal evolution, vertebrate evolution, mammalian evolution, and hominid evolution, to see our full human selves living our lives.
….
THE ECONOMIC WEB AND THE EVOLUTION OF FUTURE WEALTH
Economists employ the concepts of complementary and substitute goods. A hammer and a nail are complements since they are used together to create value. A nail and a screw are, largely, substitutes, since you can usually replace one with the other. Now imagine points in a large room for all 10 billion goods and services in the global economy. Draw green lines between points that are complements, and red lines between points that are substitutes. The resulting graph is a depiction of the global economic web as it stands today. Fifty thousand years ago the web would have contained a hundred to a thousand points. Thus, over time, the economic web has expanded into its adjacent possible. Our task is to understand how it expands, and what role the structure of the web itself plays in its own expansion. None of this is known. But it is virtually inconceivable that this evolution, which persistently creates new economic niches and destroys old ones, is not a central part of economic growth.
Here is a first step. Most novel goods and services enter the economy as either complements to or substitutes for existing goods and services. There is no point in inventing the TV channel changer, for instance, until the television is invented and deployed reasonably widely, and there are multiple channels. So, the channel changer is a complement to the television. This simple example demonstrates that, as the economic web evolves, it does persistently create new economic niches for new goods and services that fit functionally, hence sensibly, into the existing web. The web begets its own future in ways that we cannot foretell. But, in addition, the television might become of use for other purposes, say long distance banking, as the computer has come to have new uses with respect to word processing, and the engine block that became the chasse. Once that happens still new, unforeseeable, functional compliments may fit into the still new niches that the existing good, used for a new purpose, affords. Thus, it is not at all clear, even for existing goods and services, that we can actually prestate all the uses to which they might be put, hence which new economic niches they might create.
In considering the growth of the economic web, therefore, a central question is whether, on average, each new good or service affords less than one, exactly one, or more than one new complementary or substitute possibility in the adjacent possible. If the answer is more than one, then the web (ignoring for the moment investment capital, adoption of new technologies, and other issues) can grow exponentially. That is, if each new good or service affords more than 1.0 new niches for yet further new goods and services, then new economic niches explode exponentially as the economic web grows in diversity. Under these circumstances the very diversity of the web “autocatalytically” drives its own growth into the adjacent possible, affording ever new economic niches—ever new ways of making a living. This point is made even stronger if we bear in mind the new uses which existing goods might come to have, hence the unexpected new niches that might arise as the complements or substitutes for those new uses. In turn this raises the fascinating question of whether the emergence of new uses of existing goods itself depends upon the diversity of already existing goods in the economic web.….
Both anecdotes and good economic data support the rough idea that the diversity of goods and services in an economy drives its growth. In her famous book The Growth of Cities, Jane Jacobs notes that in postwar Milan and its hinterland, and in Tokyo and its hinterland, a web of complementary technologies mutually spurred economic growth. Jose Scheinkman and colleagues studied a variety of American cities, normalized industries for total capitalization, and found a positive correlation between economic diversity and growth. Thus, there are some demonstrated grounds to believe that the economic web autocatalytically drives its own growth into the economic adjacent possible, generating ever new economic niches and evolving future wealth. Another clue that economic diversity aids the innovation of new goods can be found in the story of the Wright brothers’ airplane. Their first successful aircraft was a recombination between a modified boat’s propeller, an airfoil, a light gas engine, and bicycle wheels. The more goods there are in an economy, the more potential recombinations there are among them. Put an umbrella down the smokestack of the Queen Mary and you get soot in the first-class cabins. Put the same umbrella behind a Cessna and you get an airbrake. Fifty thousand years ago, the recombination possibilities among the few goods and services were few. Now, if we just consider pairs of goods, N goods yields N2 combinations, any of which has a chance of being useful.
PROLOGUE
Kauffman, Stuart A.. A World Beyond Physics
Classical physics, our gift from Newton, is our world written in the passive voice: rivers flow, rocks fall, planets orbit, stars arc in the space-time deformed by their masses. There are no doings, only happenings: myriad, miraculous, but brute.
I broach 78 years as I sit to write, having angled to the kitchen to pick out a nectarine to eat. Yesterday, I clambered aboard the “Poised Realm,” my 22-foot boat, to skiff across to the Crane Dock on Orcas Island to drive to Eastsound, Washington, to buy the nectarine I just retrieved as an afternoon snack. My heart thumps a bit, my own human heart. Most of my readers have a human heart as well.
Just where did my human heart, the nectarine, my kitchen, the boat, and Eastsound come from since the brute happening of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago?
Since Newton, we have turned to physics to assess reality: what is REAL. But physics will not tell us whence we come, how arrived, why the human heart exists, nor why I can buy nectarines in Eastsound, let alone what “buying” is.
We will talk of these things, for there is more to know than we know and more to say than we can say.
We are in a world beyond physics.
We are in a world of living creatures that construct themselves. Yet we lack the concepts to say it. A tree, from a seed, builds itself, launches itself upward toward the sun. We see it and do not yet know what to say. A forest builds itself, rooted, branched, quiet, as if longing. Our biosphere too grows in diversity into what it can become and has done so for some 3.7 billion years. A giraffe? Who knew three billion years ago? None could have known. And nectarines: Who could then have said?
We estimate that 50 to 90 percent of the 10 to the power of 22 (1022) stars in the known universe have planets cycling them. If, as I believe and will say, life is abundant, the universe is rife with becoming, based on physics but beyond any physics we know.
The concept of perhaps 1022 biospheres staggers me. Yes, we thrill at Hubble’s image of billions of galaxies, some 1011 of them. But are there 1022 biospheres, ebullient like ours? Not “a world beyond physics,” but “worlds beyond physics,” as vast as the vastness of the physics we know, almost unknowable.
We miss in our science the idea of a system that constructs itself. I will introduce the requisite concept due to Maël Montévil and Mateo Mossio (2015) called “Constraint Closure”. These young scientists have found a, or maybe “the,” missing concept of biological organization. We will grow to understand it clearly and build on it. The ideas are a tiny bit complex, but not very. We will get to them. But for now, we can think of constraint closure like this: it is a set of both constraints on the release of energy in non-equilibrium processes, and those processes, such that the system constructs its own constraints. This is an amazing idea. Cells do this, automobiles do not.
Living systems achieve this constraint closure and do what are called “thermodynamic work cycles” by which they can reproduce themselves. Living systems also exhibit Darwin’s heritable variation, so can undergo his natural selection, hence evolve. I’ve written about that in some of my earlier books. But I was nagged by a feeling that there was something missing. With constraint closure a crucial puzzle piece is put into place.
But what evolves cannot be said ahead of time: what evolves emerges un-pre-statably—I know of no better word—and builds our biosphere of increasing complexity. We are its children: as are giraffes, nectarines, and sea cucumber. Some years ago, at his 70th birthday fest, a physicist friend of mine smiled at the way biologists see the world. Were biologists with Galileo on the tower of Pisa, they would have dropped red stones, orange stones, pink stones, blue stones, green stones, and so on. My physicist colleagues chuckled knowingly. Physicists seek to simplify to find laws, biologists to study how life became complex. So of course, the red stones were giraffes; the orange stones nectarines; the blue stones sea cucumbers; and the green stones, well, just us. The question is not whether the sea cucumber, giraffe, us, or the nectarine falls faster, but where did they come from in the very first place?
Physics won’t say. No one knows.
There is a world beyond physics.
Darwin taught that new species drive wedges into the crowded floor of nature to make room for their own existence: yes, but no. Creatures, by existing, create the very conditions for other creatures to come into existence. Species constitute the very cracks in the floor of nature that constitute the niches for yet new species to come into existence, creating yet more cracks for still more species to spring forth.
The blossoming biosphere creates its own ever-new possibilities of becoming, yet more diverse and abundant. The same holds, almost unnoted, for the exploding global economy. New goods create niches for yet further new goods: the invention of the World Wide Web created niches for selling on the Web, hence eBay and Amazon; which in turn created content on the Web, hence niches for search engines like Google; and for businesses that try to game, the search algorithms to sell more stuff. Or think of all the iPhone apps: and apps upon apps, like the ad blockers that remove the sales pitches from what Safari shows.
We stumble into the world we make possible as we lumber forward, with no or little insight or foreknowledge. I can go to Eastsound to buy nectarines.
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.
THE WORLD IS NOT A MACHINE
Since the triumphs of Descartes, Newton, and Laplace and the birth of classical physics, we have come to regard physics as the answer to our questions about what reality “is.” In that search, we have come to think of the world as a vast machine. This Newtonian fundamental framework is wonderfully extended by Special and General Relativity. Quantum Mechanics, and Quantum Field Theory, alter some of the basic deterministic aspects of classical physics but not the view of reality as an enormous “machine.”
My thesis in this book is that, with respect to an evolving biosphere, ours and any in the universe, the “machine” thesis is wrong. Evolving life is not a machine. Elaborating how this is so will require some patience on all our parts. The consequences of the change in world view here proposed cannot be anticipated, but I hope they will include the realization that we are members of a living world of untellable creativity in its becoming. Along with that, I hope, will come a profound joy—an expanded awareness, a heightened appreciation, and a deepened sense of responsibility for the living world. Time will tell.