Kauffman '61 gives facts of life
By Marua Henninger | February 6, 1997Stuart Kauffman '61, the second of this term's Mongtomery Fellows, yesterday addressed in front of a packed Rocky 3 the topics of life's emergence on Earth and the possibility of life elsewhere. Kauffman's lecture, titled "At Home in the Universe, Is Life Probable Everywhere?" drew a capacity crowd that overflowed from Rocky 3 into Rocky 2, where students watched the speech on a large-screen television. Half stand-up comedian and half lecturing theoretical biologist, Kauffman began by speculating whether there could be life on Mars. If there were life on the "Red Planet," Kauffman said, the most important possible consequence could occur if life on Mars were dramatically different from Earth, in which case scientists would be confronted with the first time in our intellectual history with the means to invent a general biology. He asserted that because this was a completely unexplored area of science, the most important step in beginning to research all of the possibilities presented would be the asking of questions. "The science which is the best of sciences and the most confusing of sciences is the forming of questions, or protoscience," he told the audience.