The Origins of Order by Stuart Kauffman 1993

Dense read, I had to develop a novel skimming technique to get through what I got through. His conclusions are excellent reviews, with an impressively direct sentence->section mapping, so read that and then read the sections that look interesting. The book is not for reading cover to cover, unless you are a student of Kauffman's and extending his work directly.

part one talks about the conclusions, over 40 years, that he has come to about the structure of fitness landscapes, via analytical work on his NK model.

part two is about the origin of life and, in a move that the 'me' of four years ago would not have expected, it skipped it.

part three has an interesting mix of biology and work similar to that in Part one. The biology is funny because it is offered as a high level gloss but is obviously only intelligible to people who already know everything that he covers. It has the best summary of the important results and applications of RBNs (random Boolean networks) to biology, a perspective that I've picked up only tangentially by hanging around Artemy and Luis.