Origins of Order [1] key Points

1) Evolution depends on both natural selection and self-organization.

2) Selection achieves and maintains complex systems poised at the "edge of chaos". These systems are best able to coordinate complex tasks and evolve in a complex environment. (Btw, this is exactly the argument that we use for Scrum: http://www.agilescrum.com. In our work we quote directly Kauffman's work to argue that software teams operate best at the edge of chaos, and that the Scrum techniques help teams achieve this state.)

3) Selection becomes less able to avoid the typical features of systems of as entities under selection become progressively more complex

4) Coevolving systems optimize their capacity to coevolve by mutually attaining the edge of chaos. (In Scrum we also use this argument to show why a business organization and a software organization coevolve best if both are poised at the edge of chaos, and why software teams coevolve best when they are simultaneously achieve the edge of chaos.)

5) The origin of life is an expected emergent collective property dependent on the self-organization of catalysts webs.

6) The connected web of metabolic transformations that defines protometabolism is also an emergent property that depends on self-organization

7) Highly ordered features of ontogeny are not hard-won achievements of selection but expected self-organization behaviors of the complex genetic regulatory systems. (For example, cell types differ because the activation and repression of genes is controlled by elaborate regulatory networks.)

8) Self-organization drives properties such as: cell types, homeostatic stability of cell types, number of cell types, similarity of gene expression patterns in cell types, branching pathways of cell differentiation, and many other aspects of cell differentiation; that not even selection can avoid.

9) Morphology can be best understood in terms of a collaboration of self-ordered properties and selection - a marriage between the laws of form and the agency of selection. (Some inspiration is borrowed from D'Arcy Thompson's "On Growth and Form", but I am surprised he missed the "Laws of Form" by G. Spencer-Brown.)

10) Stable configurations, like cell types, genotypes, or even whole organisms are attractors, and mutations are jumps from one attractor form to another one, in a climbing process seeking the peaks of fitness landscapes.

I am sure much more can be added.

[1] Origins of Order by Stu Kauffman