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Biosketch
Stuart Alan Kauffman (born September 28, 1939) is an American medical doctor, theoretical biologist, and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. He was a professor the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Calgary. He is currently emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and affiliate faculty at the Institute for 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 self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection. In sixties Kauffman used random Boolean networks to investigate generic self-organizing properties of gene regulatory networks. Using these models, he proposed that cell types are dynamical attractors in gene regulatory networks and that cell differentiation can be understood as transitions between attractors; indeed, recent evidences suggest that cell types in humans and other organisms are attractors. He also proposed the self-organized emergence of collectively autocatalytic sets of polymers, specifically peptides, for the origin of molecular reproduction, a hypothesis that recently has found experimental support. He is the author of enlightening books, such as The Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution (1993), At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (1995) and Humanity in a Creative Universe (2016).