Word: kauffman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most recent comprehensive studies of student life were done in the 1960s, when explanations were sought for the explosive events on college campuses. The major studies in that era, such as The College and the Student, edited by Lawrence E. Dennis and Joseph F. Kauffman, emphasized the importance of "the relationships and responsibilities in undergraduate education and college governance." The central theme of that book, as of others, was the exploration of new sources of campus conflicts and the rights and responsibilities of the student and the college...
...findings is more so. It not only adds pieces to this intriguing puzzle but also goes one step further: making an analogy between the events of the Cambrian explosion and the characteristics of a chaotic system. In so doing, you raise a disturbing question: Might not theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman's idea of the intrinsic instability of the evolving system be greatest when the gradient of change is at its steepest? If so, is the closing paragraph of your report pointing out the precariousness of human existence in the face of the current technological ''big bang''? CHARLES F. (''CHICK'') KELLER...
...book, At Home in the Universe (Oxford University Press; $25), theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute argues that underlying the creative commotion during the Cambrian are laws that we have only dimly glimpsed - laws that govern not just biological evolution but also the evolution of physical, chemical and technological systems. The fanciful animals that first appeared on nature's sketchpad remind Kauffman of early bicycles, with their odd-size wheels and strangely angled handlebars. "Soon after a major innovation," he writes, "discovery of profoundly different variations is easy. Later innovation is limited to modest improvements on increasingly...
Biological evolution, says Kauffman, is just one example of a self-organizing system that teeter-totters on the knife edge between order and chaos, "a grand compromise between structure and surprise." Too much order makes change impossible; too much chaos and there can be no continuity. But since balancing acts are necessarily precarious, even the most adroit tightrope walkers sometimes make one move too many. Mass extinctions, chaos theory suggests, do not require comets or volcanoes to trigger them. They arise naturally from the intrinsic instability of the evolving system, and superior fitness provides no safety...
...just as the tiniest touch can cause a steeply angled sand pile to slide, so may a small evolutionary advance that gives one species a temporary advantage over another be enough to bring down an entire ecosystem. "These patterns of speciations and extinctions, avalanching across ecosystems and time," warns Kauffman, are to be found in every chaotic system - human and biological. "We are all part of the same pageant," as he puts it. Thus, even in this technological age, we may have more in common than we care to believe with the weird - and ultimately doomed - wonders that radiated...