A kind of evolutionary epistemology. Does Stuart Kauffman show up in the text or index? Ian
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Yes, Kauffman, SA, 1993, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (bibliography). Index: 85, 926-7, 1054, 1182, 1273.
Under the summary section, Chp 11: The integration of constraint and adaptation: structural constraits, spandrels, and exaptation.
``2. Stuart Kauffman and Brian Goodwin have presented the most cogent modern arguments in this tradition of diret physical causation. These arguments hold substantial power for explaingin some features of relatively simple biolgoical systems, say from life's beginnings to the origin of prokaryotic cells, where basic organic chemistry and the physics of self-organizing systems can play out their timeless and general rules. Such models also have substantial utility in describing very broad features of the ecology and energy dynamics of living systems in general terms that transcend any particular taxonomic composition. But this approach founders, as did D'Arcy Thomspson's as well, when the contingent and phyletically bound histories of particular complex lineages fall under scrutiny---and such systems do constitue the `bread an butter' of macroevolution. Nonetheless, Kauffman's powerful notion of `order for free,' or adaptive configurations that emerge from the ahistoric 9even abiological) nature of systems, and need not be explained by particular invocations of some functional force like natural selection, should give us pause before we speculate about Darwinian causes only from evidence of functionality. This `order for free' aids, and does not confute, such functional forces as selection by providing easier (even automatic) pathways towards a common desideratum of adaptive biological systems.'' (85p)
Chuck Grimes