1210 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
broaden the neo-Darwinian tradition. For, despite its resilience, that tradition has
surely grown without seriously attempting to integrate the ways in which simple and
complex systems may spontaneously exhibit order." "My aim throughout is to
attempt to characterize... those aspects which may reflect the self-organized
properties of the... system and those which reflect selection—and to determine a
way of recognizing the marriage between the two" (p. 407).
Kauffman continually invokes two key phrases to epitomize his understanding
of direct physical molding in the evolution of adaptive form in anatomy, ontogeny
and interacting biological systems in general. First, he seeks to explicate the
spontaneous "order for free," to which systems naturally conform, and which
provides natural selection with a rich substrate for fine-tuning and more specific
molding. In stating his intentions for ontogeny, and recalling his similar conclusions
for ecosystems, Kauffman writes (p. 409). (I like his phrase "gratuitously present" as
a description of order for free):
Highly constrained, poised cell types and ordered patterns of gene activity,
each able to change to only a few others, are gratuitously present in a vast
class of genomic regulatory systems... The phase transition from one regime
to another is governed by simple parameters of the system, such as richness of
coupling among the variables. The order seen in ontogeny, I shall suggest, is
just that which arises spontaneously in the powerfully ordered regime found in
parallel-processing networks. Selection, I shall further suggest, by achieving
genomic systems in the ordered regime near the boundary of chaos, is likely to
have optimized the capacity of such systems to perform complex gene-
coordination tasks and evolve effectively.In the other important book from the 1990's on this view of life, Goodwin (1994,
p. 186) emphasizes the "generic" nature of order for free: "Much (and perhaps most)
of the order that we see in living nature is an expression of properties intrinsic to
complex dynamic systems organized by simple rules of interaction among large
numbers of elements. This order is generic, and what we see in evolution may be
primarily an emergence of states generic to the dynamics of living systems."
With his second phrase, Kauffman emphasizes evolvability rather than form or
organization per se in arguing that biological systems naturally evolve to "adaptation
at the edge of chaos." He holds (p. 645) that "the capacity to evolve is itself subject to
evolution and may have its own lawful properties. The construction principles
permitting adaptation, too, may emerge as universals. Adaptation to the edge of chaos
is just such a candidate construction principle." Kauffman continually stresses the
abstract, general and timeless nature of those aspects of biological order that he
would ascribe to "the nature of things" rather than to any distinctively organic
mechanism like natural selection (which can then act upon the inherent and generic
properties to construct more specific utilities in particular environments).
For these reasons of non-competition at their different scales (generic order