Evolution

Books

A World Beyond Physics - The Emergence and Evolution of Life

by Stuart A. Kauffman

If you are familiar with Stuart Kauffman’s work and talks a lot of this book will also be familiar. Kauffman attempts to explain how life evolved from the chemical world into the world of living things. He examines self catalytic compounds and reactions and shows who evolution not only evolves the next generation of things but also the next generation of possibilities which may end up taking the organism in a new direction. One of the best examples is that of the evolution of IT each step builds upon another but noone could anticipate even a few steps along the road from the evolution of the transistor to Google.com. This is why the world is governed by physics but physics aka mathematics can’t predict how evolution will go.

A really good explanation about how the complexity of life could have come from self catalytic chemical processes and then self catalytic organisms whose form could not have been mechanistically predicted in advance but arose from opportunities presented by present. Really worth a read though you might need to take notes about the technical terms at times.

Audiobook really needs an accompanying PDF.