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briefly an intern at Cincinnati General Hospital before becoming an assistant
professor of biophysics and theoretical biology at the University of Chicago
from 1969 to 1975. Overlapping with that, he was a surgeon at the National
Cancer Institute in Bethesda from 1973 to 1975, before taking a tenured posi-
tion in biochemistry and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1975.
He formally retired from that position in 1995, but from 1986 to 1997 his pri-
mary affiliation was as a professor at the newly established Santa Fe Institute
(SFI) in New Mexico. In 1996, he was the founding general partner of Bios
Group, again in Santa Fe, and in 2004 he moved to the University of Calgary
as director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics and professor in
the departments of Biological Sciences and Physics and Astronomy.
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It is not unreasonable to read this pattern as a familiar search for a con-
genial environment for a research career that sorts ill with conventional
disciplinary and professional concerns and elicits more connections across
disciplines and fields than within any one of them. The sociological novelty
that appears here concerns two of Kauffman's later affiliations. The Santa
Fe Institute was established in 1984 to foster a research agenda devoted to
“simplicity, complexity, complex systems, and particularly complex adaptive
systems” and is, in effect, an attempt to provide a relatively enduring social
basis for the transient interdisciplinary communities—the Macy and Namur
conferences, the Ratio Club—that were “home” to Walter, Ashby, and the rest
of the first generation of cyberneticians. Notably, the SFI is a freestanding
institution and not, for example, part of any university. The sociologically
improvised character of cybernetics reappears here, but now at the level of
institutions rather than individual careers.
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And two other remarks on the
SFI are relevant to our themes. One is that while the SFI serves the purpose of
stabilizing a community of interdisciplinary researchers, it does not solve the
problem of cultural transmission: as a private, nonprofit research institute it
does not teach students and grant degrees.
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The other is that the price of insti-
tutionalization is, in this instance, a certain narrowing. The focus of research
at the SFI is resolutely technical and mathematical. Ross Ashby might have
been happy there, but not, I think, any of our other principals. Their work was
too rich and diverse to be contained by such an agenda.
Besides the SFI, I should comment on Kauffman's affiliation with the Bios
Group (which merged with NuTech Solutions in 2003). “BiosGroup was
founded by Dr. Stuart Kauffman with a mission to tackle industry's tough-
est problems through the application of an emerging technology, Complexity
Science.”
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Here we have an attempt is establish a stable social basis for the
science of complexity on a business rather than a scholarly model—a pattern
