Self-Organization
A CAS organizes itself. Stuart Kauffman claims this is a natural property of all complex systems, including the primordial ooze that supposedly produced the first living cell. He called this “order for free” in his book At Home In the Universe.[1]
[1] Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press, 1995, 23.
You might remember from grade school science that a fellow named Francesco Redi disproved the idea of spontaneous generation. He did an experiment to prove that rotting meat didn't spawn maggots. He showed that flies laid eggs in the meat, and the eggs produced the maggots. Well, not so fast. In a nutshell, Kauffman claims that life on Earth bootstrapped ...
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