Stuart Kauffman

Kauffman presently holds a joint appointment at the University Of Calgary in Biological Sciences and in Physics and Astronomy. He is also an iCORE chair.

He graduated from Dartmouth in 1960, was awarded the BA(Hons) by Oxford University in 1963, and completed a medical degree (M.D.) at the University Of California, San Francisco in 1968. After a brief medical career, he moved into Developmental Genetics , holding appointments first at the University Of Chicago , then at the University Of Pennsylvania from 1975 to 1995, where he rose to Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics . Kauffman held a MacArthur Fellowship , 1987-1992.

Kauffman rose to prominence through his association with the Santa Fe Institute (a non-profit research institute dedicated to the study of complex systems), where he was faculty in residence from 1986 to 1997, and through his work on Models in various areas of Biology . These included Autocatalytic Set s in Origin Of Life research, Gene Regulatory Network s in Developmental Biology , and Fitness Landscape s in Evolutionary Biology .

Some fellow biologists working in Kauffman's area reserve judgement on Kauffman's claims about self-organization and evolution. A case in point is the introduction to the 2002 book '' Self Organization in Biological Systems ''.

In 1996, Kauffman started . As of 2003, Kauffman was a director of NuTech.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

1993. ''Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution''. Oxford University Press. Technical monograph. ISBN 0-19-507951-5

1995. ''At Home in the Universe''. Oxford University Press. Popular treatment of many of the ideas in ''Origins''. ISBN 0-19-511130-3

2000. ''Investigations''. Oxford University Press. Speculative definitions of life. ISBN 0-19-512105-8

2004, ''Prolegomenon to a General Biology'' (a section from ''Investigations''), in ''. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-82949-6

2004, "Autonomous Agents" in John D. Barrow , P.C.W. Davies , and C.L. Harper Jr., eds., ''Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology, and Complexity''. Cambridge University Press.

REFERENCES

Dana MacKinzie, "The Science of Surprise," Discover Magazine, Vol. 23, No. 2, 59-63 (February 2002). link

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	CATEGORIES ABOUT STUART KAUFFMAN

	1939 births

	biophysicists

	complex systems scientists

	dartmouth college alumni

	macarthur fellows

	living people

	systems scientists

	theoretical biologists

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