A Book That Needed a Better Editor and I Still Can't Stop Thinking About It

Okay so I picked this up because someone in a forum thread called it the most important science book nobody’s heard of, and, honestly, after finishing it I get why nobody’s heard of it, it fights you the whole way through. Stuart Kauffman is describing his own research here, into this field he and a handful of others were basically inventing as they went, complexity theory, and the pitch underneath all of it is huge. What if life showing up on earth wasn’t some improbable accident, one in a trillion trillion, what if it was closer to inevitable, baked into how chemicals behave once you get enough of them bumping into each other.

That’s auto-catalytic sets, his big idea, molecules that end up catalyzing each other’s formation until the whole soup starts, in a sense, reproducing itself, no divine spark required, no lightning bolt hitting the primordial pond. He runs the same logic on evolution too, arguing that genes might be self-organized in ways that make improvement likely rather than a fluke of random mutation stacking on random mutation.

Here’s my actual complaint though, and I’m not the only one who’s had it. Amazing ideas, could’ve used a good editor. It’s genuinely not an easy read, there’s real math in here, not tons of equations but enough that I had to reread pages, and Kauffman swings between dry technical writing and these sudden lyrical passages about existing “at home” in the universe that read like a different person wrote them. One reviewer called it cliched and repetitive even while praising how clear he manages to be, and that’s exactly the tension, clear ideas, muddy delivery.

Four stars. Read it slow, twice if you have to, it’s worth the effort.