A pioneer in the field of complexity theory, Stuart A. Kauffman is a biologist, trained as a medical doctor, who studies the origins of life and the origins of molecular organization. While still a graduate student, he began testing his ideas by simulating the interaction of various abstract agents — representative of chemical and biological substances — on computers. He concluded that upon reaching a certain level of diversity, a system of simple chemicals undergoes a dramatic transformation. Similar to a phase change in physics, molecules spontaneously combine to create larger, more complex molecules with catalytic capability leading to the formation of collectively autocatalytic sets of molecules. If so, life may be an expected property of complex chemical systems. His theory led him to the further hypothesis that complex arrays of interacting genes, which turn one another on and off, do not behave randomly but tend to converge toward a relatively small number of recurring patterns that exhibit stunning degrees of order.
In The Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution (1993), Dr. Kauffman proposed that the principle of self-organization may have played a larger role than natural selection in shaping the development of life on Earth. On a practical level, his ideas about what is sometimes called “molecular diversity” helped spawn a field known as combinatorial chemistry. The new field continues to revolutionize drug development by making it possible to create and sift through vast quantities of potential drug ingredients with lightening speed.
Holder of a dozen broad biotechnology patents, Dr. Kauffman was the founding general partner (with Ernst & Young) of Bios Group LP, a company that sought to apply biological theories to business and was acquired by NuTech Solution on 2003. He is currently affiliated with several educational and research institutions, including: the University of Calgary, where he served for five years as founding director the Institute of Biocomplexity and Informatics and is now iCore Visiting Professor; Tampere University of Technology, where he is Finland Distinguished Professor; and the University of Vermont, where he is Macmillian Scholar-in-Residence at the Complex Systems Center and holds joint appointments as a visiting distinguished research professor in the College of Medicine and the College of Mathematical and Engineering Sciences. He also is an adjunct professor of pathology at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, an internal visiting professor at George Mason University’s Krasnow Institute, and an affiliate in neurobiology at Montana State University.
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dartmouth College, Dr. Kauffman studied philosophy at Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship and took his M.D. in 1968 from the University of California/San Francisco Medical School. He began his career as an assistant professor of biophysics and theoretical biology at the University of Chicago then taught for twenty years at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where he is now emeritus professor of biochemistry and biophysics, before moving on to the Santa Fe Institute. He was a professor there for more than a decade, served on the Institute’s board of trustees and its scientific advisory board, and continues his association as a member of the external faculty. From 2003 to 2005, he was a research professor in cell biology and physiology at the University of New Mexico. In 2005 he founded the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, which he directed until 2009. In 2009 he spent a semester as a visiting professor in the Harvard Divinity School. Beginning in 2010, he spends part of his year as visiting Distinguished Professor at the Tampere University of Technology in Finland, and part of his year at the University of Vermont where he is helping to grow a Spire of Excellence in Complex Systems.
Dr. Kauffman has served as president of the Society for Mathematical Biology and presently serves as a member of the science advisory boards of Icosystems, Gene Network Science, Applied Molecular Evolution, KatFat Inc., McMaster University’s Origins Institute, and the Natural Research Council of Canada’s Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences. The recipient of many awards, he held a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius prize,” from 1987 to 1992 and won the American Cybernetic Society’s Weiner Gold Medal in 1971 and the Gold Medal of the Italian Accademia Nazionale dei Lincea in 1997. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and was awarded an honorary degree last year by the Catholic University of Louvain. The former co-chief editor of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, he has served on the editorial boards of many other journals.
Dr. Kauffman has published more than 180 scientific papers and is the co-editor of one book and the author of four others. Following his groundbreaking Origins of Order, his widely acclaimed At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (1996) spelled out the implications of his theories on biological evolution as he showed how order emerges naturally — and possibly even necessarily — out of chaos. Investigations (2002) defines and explains autonomous agents and work in the contexts of thermodynamics and of information theory leading the author to explore the requirements for the emergence of a new biology that will transcend terrestrial biology in search of laws governing biospheres anywhere in the cosmos. His most recent volume, the provocative Revisiting the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, which was published by Basic Books in 2008, refutes the kind of physicalism that rules out ontological emergence and, in redefining God as the natural creativity in the universe itself, proposes a novel metaphysics.