xviii, 709 pages : 24 cm

Stuart Kauffman here presents a brilliant new paradigm for evolutionary biology, one that extends the basic concepts of Darwinian evolution to accommodate recent findings and perspectives from the fields of biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics. The book drives to the heart of the exciting debate on the origins of life and maintenance of order in complex biological systems. It focuses on the concept of self-organization: the spontaneous emergence of order widely observed throughout nature. Kauffman here argues that self-organization plays an important role in the emergence of life itself and may play as fundamental a role in shaping life's subsequent evolution as does the Darwinian process of natural selection. Yet until now no systematic effort has been made to incorporate the concept of self-organization into evolutionary theory. The construction requirements which permit complex systems to adapt remain poorly understood, as is the extent to which selection itself can yield systems able to adapt more successfully. This book explores these themes. It shows how complex systems, contrary to expectations, can spontaneously exhibit stunning degrees of order, and how this order, in turn, is essential for understanding the emergence and development of life on Earth. Topics include the new biotechnology of applied molecular evolution, with its important implications for developing new drugs and vaccines; the balance between order and chaos observed in many naturally occurring systems; new insights concerning the predictive power of statistical mechanics in biology; and other major issues. Indeed, the approaches investigated here may prove to be the new center around which biological science itself will evolve. The work is written for all those interested in the cutting edge of research in the life sciences

Includes bibliographical references (pages 647-694) and index

Conceptual outline of current evolutionary theory -- The structure of rugged fitness landscapes -- Biological implications of rugged fitness landscapes -- The structure of adaptive landscapes underlying protein evolution -- Self-organization and adaptation in complex systems -- The dynamics of coevolving systems -- The origins of life : a new view -- The origin of a connected metabolism -- Hypercycles and coding -- Random grammars : models of functional integration and transformation -- The architecture of genetic regulatory circuits and its evolution -- Differentiation : the dynamical behaviors of genetic regularity networks -- Selection for cell types -- Morphology, maps, and the spatial ordering of integrated tissues

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