ROSS ASHBY - The Cybernetic Brain - page 161

idea of architecture (theoretically inspired). Egged on by a sympathetic audi-
ence, Alexander remarks that “people who believe as you do are really fuck-
ing up the whole profession of architecture right now by propagating these
beliefs” (67)—another marker of the fact that ontology makes a difference.
We can return to this theme in a different and less “comfortable” guise when
we come to Gordon Pask's version of adaptive architecture.
it is a fundamental question wHetHer metabolic stability and epigen-
esis require tHe genetic regulatory circuits to be precisely con-
structed. Has a fortunate evolutionary History selected only nets of
HigHly ordered circuits wHicH alone can insure metabolic stability;
or are stability and epigenesis, even in nets of randomly connected
interconnected regulatory circuits, to be expected as tHe probable
consequence of as yet unknown matHematical laws? are living tHings
more akin to precisely programmed automata selected by evolution,
or to randomly assembled automata wHose cHaracteristic beHavior
reflects tHeir unorderly construction, no matter How evolution se-
lected tHe surviving forms?
sTuART kAuFFMAN, “metabolic stability and epigenesis in randomly
constructed genetic nets” (1969b, 438)
Now for Stuart Kauffman, one of the founders of contemporary theoretical
biology, perhaps best known in the wider world for two topics on a complex
systems approach to the topics of biology and evolution, At Home in the Uni-
verse (1995) and Investigations (2002). I mentioned his important and explic-
itly cybernetic notion of “explanation by articulation of parts” in chapter 2,
but now we can look at his biological research. 63
The pattern for Kauffman's subsequent work was set in a group of his earli-
est scientific publications in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which concerned
just the same problem that Alexander inherited from Ashby, the question of
a large array of interacting elements achieving equilibrium. In Design for a
Brain , Ashby considered two limits—situations in which interconnections
between the elements were either minimal or maximal—and argued that the
time to equilibrium would be small in one case and longer than the age of
the universe in the other. The question that then arose was what happened
in between these limits. Ashby had originally been thinking about an array of
interacting homeostats, but one can simplify the situation by considering an