Stuart Kauffman
Stuart Alan Kauffman ( born September 28, 1939) is an American theoretical biologist who teaches biology, physics and astronomy at the University of Calgary (Canada) and is also an associate professor of philosophy. He is best known for his theory that in the genesis of the complexity of biological systems and organisms self-organization at least as important a factor as the Darwinian selection.
Life
Kauffman was initially trained as a medical doctor, is a theoretical biologist and researcher in the field of complex systems.
After studying at Dartmouth College and Oxford University Kauffmann received his doctorate of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco 1968. After a short medical career, Kauffman turned to developmental biology. He worked at the University of Chicago and was from 1975 to 1995 professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Kauffman is best known for his work at the Santa Fe Institute, which deals with the study of complex systems, and through his work with models in different fields of biology. These models were autocatalytic networks in the study of the chemical evolution of gene regulatory networks in developmental biology and fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology. In 1996, Kauffman BIOS Group, a company that applies the theory of complex systems to solve problems in business. 2004 Kauffman went to the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics, University of Calgary ( Canada). In 2009 he taught at the Technical University of Tampere (Finland). Since 2010 he is member of the Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont.
Kauffman is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 1987 he was MacArthur Fellow.
Writings of Stuart Kauffman
- Anti Chaos and Adaptation, Scientific American, August 1991. ( German: life on the edge of chaos, Scientific American, October 1991. In: Development and genes row Understandable research spectrum Akademie Verlag 1992, ISBN 3860250280 )
- The Origins of Order: Self- Organization and Selection in Evolution, Oxford University Press, 1993, ISBN 0195079515th
- At Home in the Universe, Oxford University Press, 1995, ISBN 0195111303rd ( German: The oil droplets in water, Piper 1996, ISBN 3492035493 ).
- Investigations, Oxford University Press, 2000, ISBN 0,195,121,058th
- Prolegomenon to a General Biology, in: William A. Dembski, Michael Ruse (eds. ), Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, Cambridge University Press, 2004, ISBN 0,521,829,496th
- Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. . Basic Books, 2008 ISBN 0465003001 (video engl video template: . Web archive / Maintenance / Linktext_fehltVorlage: Web archive / Maintenance / Nummerierte_Parameter the introduction )
About Stuart Kauffman
- Roger Lewin, The complexity theory, Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 1993
- M. Mitchell Waldrop, islands in the Chaos: The study of complex systems, Rowohlt, Berlin 1996