"Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the sere Earth some 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave."
Stuart Kauffman is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher, renowned for pioneering work on the origins of life, self-organisation, and biological complexity. He is currently emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and affiliate faculty at the Institute for Systems Biology. He has a number of awards including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Wiener Medal.
His research challenges purely reductionist explanations of the emergence of life and highlights creativity and spontaneous order as fundamental to biological and evolutionary processes. He is the author of influential books including The Origins of Orde, At Home in the Univers, and A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life.
"Kauffman is doing wonderful work, and he's certainly put the cat among the pigeons for old fashioned neo-Darwinism" — Niles Eldredge, American Museum of Natural History
