My Briar Patch: Notes of a Country Doctor 

At the outset I wish to express my deep appreciation to Daniel Witt for his excellent Evolution News post of September 9, wherein he summarized many of my contributions to this page, a series on the science of purpose, and juxtaposed them with the work of Stuart Kauffman. I was humbled to find myself compared with Kauffmann, a world-famous theoretical biologist. Thirty years ago, when I was still trapped in my own mechanistic prison, Kauffman’s writing opened important doors that allowed me to b