For a Redefinition of God

摘要

At a Novartis Foundation meeting 10 years ago on "the limits of reduc-tionism in biology," I presented my work on modeling heart rhythm as an example of downward causation: the idea, which Stuart Kauffinan expounds beautifully in Reinventing the Sacred, that the whole constrains the parts as much as the parts are necessary to the whole. A colleague objected: "Denis, I would go along with you, but this lets God back into the picture." I disagreed. But Kaufrman, now the director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, would wholeheartedly agree. He is one of the great masters of complexity, an essential component of the systems biology currently in vogue, and readers have found his earlier books (1-3) thrilling. His new one lives up to that promise. It sparkles from every angle as its author gallops through the relevant science, philosophy, economics, history, ethics, poetry and-well, we had better use the word because Kaufrman does: religion.