As part of the still very much exploratory searching in preparation of #47, I am slowly reading ‘The Origins of Order’ by Stuart Kauffman. It is one of the densest books I’ve ever read; many ideas per page within a grand arch that stretches from fitness landscapes and evolvability to complex systems and ontogeny. His main point is that any system or network of many interacting elements has much more strongly ordered behaviour than we would expect. This means that selection is not the only source of order in the universe, it limits the kinds of systems that are able to adapt, and it structures processes of ontogeny.
An ok review of this book you can find here, a short video lecture of Kauffman about a much more recent (and probably much less technical) book you can find here.
In the coming weeks i’m going to try some of his random boolean networks myself, and in fact what i’ve been doing so far (see here, here, here and here)can be seen as a subset of the networks he talks about. Very profound and practical at the same time !