Science’s inside outsiders

Riess is sharing random emails from his inbox to help me understand why physicists are ignoring a theory in cosmology put forward by theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman.

In 1971, Kauffman theorized a way for matter to transform into life.

He proposed that life emerges as spontaneous self-organizing molecular networks called collectively autocatalytic sets (CAS) at "the edge of chaos,” a transitional boundary between order and disorder. In CAS, components of the network interact by mutually creating and constraining each other, shaping and animating a living organism as a system distinct from its environment. The whole organism then influences all its components in a circular causal loop.

Kauffman suggests that trillions of such systems emerge and co-evolve in our biosphere through an open-ended process of circular, sideways and interdependent causation constantly moving forward in time.

This makes it impossible to fully predict all the ways any one organism will evolve and behave in relation to all others in the environment, despite adhering to physical laws.

He argues this unpredictability necessitated the evolution of intuition and creativity—emergent capabilities that aid survival in a world that can’t be navigated by reason, formal logic and linear approaches alone.