Who Ordered That?

Steven R. Postrel from the February 1996 issue

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His model looks at whether systems evolve better solutions when they are broken into interacting but independently searching "patches," or when they are combined into one big evolving organism. The latter configuration, which Kauffman charmingly refers to as "Stalinist," turns out to work well for problems of low complexity, with few conflicting constraints. When problems start to get complicated, where the solution to one aspect can easily foul up another, it turns out to be better to break the system into separate patches.

How many patches are best? Once again, the answer appears to be a "just right" number where the evolutionary process is orderly, but on the edge of chaos, so that the system can persist with good solutions but not get permanently stuck on them without looking for better ones. So neither Gosplan nor a population of yeoman farmers is likely to be a good model for a corporation tackling complex problems; the in-between compromises we see all around us probably make more sense than oft-peddled fantasies of giant cross-functional teams or purely "market-based" management, although we might have guessed that without Kauffman's models.

For anyone--including earnest 14-year-olds--interested in big questions about science, history, and our place in the cosmos, At Home in the Universe offers an unparalleled combination of graceful writing, clear exposition, respect for the reader's intelligence, and the thrill of seeing the world anew. I do not know which, if any, of its ideas will become the seeds of tomorrow's science, but I cannot escape the feeling that Stuart Kauffman has changed the terms in which thoughtful people will discuss the nature of evolution and natural law.