Charlebois, Physics, University of Alberta, The Quarterly Review of Biology It should prove a worthwhile read for anyone with an undergraduate knowledge of biology and physics who is interested in amore philosophical take on the origins, complexities, and evolution of life." - Rebekah Hall, Mathematical & Statistical Sciences and Daniel A. " A World Beyond Physics is a well-written and thought provoking book. "This is a delightful little book that considers the classic question, "What is life?"" - P. I highly recommend Kauffman's book to anyone interestedin the ongoing scientific enterprise to model the transition from physical to living systems." - Ragnar van der Merwe, University of Johannesburg, Metascience prose is reader-friendly and thought-provoking. " A World Beyond Physics, broken into short chapters and written with infectious enthusiasm and exclamation marks, is meant as an introduction to the importance of emergence in biology." - Kevin Schilbrack, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture If life is abundant in the universe, this self-constructing, propagating, exploding diversity takes us beyond physics to biospheres everywhere. Evolving living creatures, by existing, create new niches into which yet further new creatures can emerge. Evolution propagates this burgeoning organization. The resulting protocells were capable of Darwin's heritable variation, hence open-ended evolution by natural selection. The emergence of such systems-the origin of life problem-was probably a spontaneous phase transition to self-reproduction in complex enough prebiotic systems. Living cells are "machines" that construct and assemble their own working parts. Cells are autopoetic systems that build themselves: they literally construct their own constraints on the release of energy into a few degrees of freedom that constitutes the very thermodynamic work by which they build their own self creating constraints. But physics alone cannot tell us where we came from, how we arrived, and why our world has evolved past the point of unicellular organisms to an extremely complex biosphere.īuilding on concepts from his work as a complex systems researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, Kauffman focuses in particular on the idea of cells constructing themselves and introduces concepts such as "constraint closure." Living systems are defined by the concept of "organization" which has not been focused on in enough in previous works. Since Newton, we have turned to physics to assess reality. That evolution is a process of "becoming" in each case. Among the estimated one hundred billion solar systems in the known universe, evolving life is surely abundant. How did life start? Is the evolution of life describable by any physics-like laws? Stuart Kauffman's latest book offers an explanation-beyond what the laws of physics can explain-of the progression from a complex chemical environment to molecular reproduction, metabolism and to early protocells, and further evolution to what we recognize as life. Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Global Public Health.
WORLD BEYOND SERIES
The European Society of Cardiology Series.
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