[[Stuart Kauffman]] (b. 1939) is an American theoretical biologist and physician, another founder of the [[Santa Fe Institute]], and the field's self-organisation thinker. Where [[John Holland]] asked how agents adapt, Kauffman asked why order appears at all — *without* being selected for or designed in. His early work used **random Boolean networks**: switch-like genes wired at random, which spontaneously settle into ordered, cycling behaviour. The conclusion was radical: much biological order is self-organised, a property of the kind of network life is, not a trick of natural selection. Natural selection then works *with* the order self-organisation supplies, rather than creating everything from scratch. He named the fertile regime between frozen order and chaos the **edge of chaos** — the idea later borrowed wholesale for the arts and organisations. His books carry the argument outward: *The Origins of Order* (1993) and *At Home in the Universe* (1995) in biology; *Reinventing the Sacred* (2008), which argues for a nature "worthy of reverence" without supernatural addition. His term for the untapped space of possible forms is the **adjacent possible** — the sum of what can arise from what already exists, one step at a time. It has become the standard way to talk about where new ideas can come from: the studio explores its adjacent possible, one chance mark at a time. [Stuart Kauffman (Wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Kauffman) `Concepts:` [[Complexity Theory]] · [[Complex Adaptive Systems]] `Knowledge Base:`