Stuart Alan Kauffman (born September 28, 1939) is an American medical doctor, theoretical biologist, and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth.

He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as discussed in his book Origins of Order (1993).

He also proposed the self-organized emergence of collectively autocatalytic sets of polymers, specifically peptides, for the origin of molecular reproduction,[6][7] which have found experimental support.

[8][9] Kauffman graduated from Dartmouth in 1960, was awarded the BA (Hons) by Oxford University (where he was a Marshall Scholar) in 1963, and completed a medical degree (M.D.)

With Marc Ballivet, Kauffman holds the founding broad biotechnology patents in combinatorial chemistry and applied molecular evolution, first issued in France in 1987,[10] in England in 1989, and later in North America.

[11][12] In 1996, with Ernst and Young, Kauffman started BiosGroup, a Santa Fe, New Mexico-based for-profit company that applied complex systems methodology to business problems.

Kauffman was also invited to help launch the Science and Religion initiative at Harvard Divinity School; serving as visiting professor in 2009.

In January 2009 Kauffman became a Finland Distinguished Professor (FiDiPro) at Tampere University of Technology, Department of Signal Processing.

The subject of the FiDiPro research project is the development of delayed stochastic models of genetic regulatory networks based on gene expression data at the single molecule level.

In January 2010 Kauffman joined the University of Vermont faculty where he continued his work for two years with UVM's Complex Systems Center.

[16] From early 2011 to April 2013, Kauffman was a regular contributor to the NPR Blog 13.7, Cosmos and Culture,[17] with topics ranging from the life sciences, systems biology, and medicine, to spirituality, economics, and the law.

[22] Kauffman's NK model defines a combinatorial phase space, consisting of every string (chosen from a given alphabet) of length

[citation needed] However, numerical experiments included in Weinberger's analysis support his analytical result that the expected fitness of a string is normally distributed with a mean of approximately

He also holds an Honorary Degree in Science from the University of Louvain (1997); He was awarded the Norbert Wiener Memorial Gold Medal for Cybernetics in 1973, the Gold Medal of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome in 1990, the Trotter Prize for Information and Complexity in 2001, and the Herbert Simon award for Complex Systems in 2013.

With respect to molecular biology, Kauffman's structuralist approach has been criticized for ignoring the role of energy in driving biochemical reactions in cells, which can fairly be called self-catalyzing but which do not simply self-organize.

[26] Borrowing from spin glass models in physics, Kauffman invented "N-K" fitness landscapes, which have found applications in biology[27] and economics.

[28][29] In related work, Kauffman and colleagues have examined subcritical, critical, and supracritical behavior in economic systems.

[30] Kauffman's work translates his biological findings to the mind-body problem and issues in neuroscience, proposing attributes of a new "poised realm" that hovers indefinitely between quantum coherence and classicality.

[20] Kauffman has contributed to the emerging field of cumulative technological evolution by introducing a mathematics of the adjacent possible.

In 2016, Kauffman wrote a children's story, "Patrick, Rupert, Sly & Gus Protocells", a narrative about unprestatable niche creation in the biosphere, which was later produced as a short animated video.