Here Be Dragons

HERE BE DRAGONS
Indian Art, which includes a teepee made of empty liquor bottles and
a wall covered with the scrawled confessions of pregnant teenagers.
And the scientists have little time for the Immanent. Stuart Kauffman,
the object of our visit, has his hands full with a start-up company
called Bios Group, whose mission is to turn complexity theory into a
cash cow.
Once at the Bios Group office, just a few steps from the central
plaza, we are kept waiting 2 hours beyond our scheduled meeting time
while, according to his assistant, Kauffman gets a massage. We are
busy plotting the writer's revenge—character assassination—when
the great man finally appears and invites us to lunch.
As it turns out, Kauffman is too interesting to sustain our animosity.
His mind, like its subject matter, is complex: it operates near the
boundary between ordered modesty and egocentric chaos. That shows
itself, for example, in a tension that arises whenever the question of
originality comes up. "I'm not the first one to think about this," he
says at one point, "although I think I'm the first one to think about it
the way I did. Melvin Calvin in his book on chemical evolution has the
idea, so I'm certainly not the first one who's played with it because his
book was in '69—I didn't get the idea from Calvin but this doesn't
matter." Or: "Freeman Dyson's got the essential idea, but he makes a
kind of argument in which, with full affection and respect for him—I
think very highly of him—it's also true that he assumed his conclusions,
he actually begs the question, if you read the book. And my reaction
was, 'Gosh, I did this in 1971, and I like my idea better than I
like these guys', and even if they're famous, I'm going to do it again.'"
In the rapidly evolving world of complexity theory, it's hard to keep
track of who first thought of what. Made possible by the advent of powerful
computers, the field is still in its "Cambrian explosion" phase,
when all kinds of exotic notions make a brief appearance on the stage,
only to succumb to Chance or Necessity. Kauffman himself has put
forward theories on all kinds of topics: how life originated, how multicellular
organisms function, how biological evolution works, and how
human institutions develop. And though he wrote in his 1995 book At
Home in the Universe, "I am not brazen enough to think about cosmic
evolution," he now does that too.
What unifies Kauffman's thought is a single leading idea: complex
systems develop, in part at least, according to intrinsic rules.
Something complex, such as a human being, didn't necessarily get
that way because of an equally complex description, instruction set, or
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