Stuart Kauffman

STUART KAUFFMAN is an American medical doctor, theoretical biologist, and complex systems  researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. He was a professor at the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and Universitry of Calgary. He is currently emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and affiliate faculty at the Institute of Systems Biology. He has a number of awards including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Wiener Medal. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from delf-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as discussed in his book Origins of Order (1993).

 He has published over 350 articles and 6 books: The Origins of Order (1993), At Home in the Universe (1995), Investigations (2000), Reinventing the Sacred (2008), Humanity in a Creative Universe (2016), and A World Beyond Physics (2019).

In 2017, exploring the concept that reality consists of both ontologically real ‘possibles’ (res potentia) and ontologically real ‘actuals’ (res extensa), Kauffman co-authored, with Ruth Kastner and Michael Epperson, ‘Taking Heisenberg’s Potentia Seriously.’