According to him, the emergence of life does not depend on a specific situation of origin. With a different composition of the pre-biotic environment, life would probably have taken on a different shape, but there is no doubt in Kauffman's mind that it would have emerged. Another process in which, according to Kauffman, self-organization plays an important role, is cell differentiation. However, the number of cell types making up an organism is much smaller than the number of possible patterns of active and non-active genes. Such a number of possibilities is of no use from a biological point of view.
Genes can, for example, influence each other by means of repressor molecules.
If, in the computer model, each gene is directly influenced by two other genes, which is a biologically sound assumption, the number of possible conditions of the genome turns out to be reduced to approximately the root of the number of elements in the network. For human beings, this would mean that the genetic network allows for some 317 different conditions. In view of the number of possible conditions and the simplifications in Kauffman's model, this corresponds reasonably well with the 256 types of cells from which man is built up. The number of types of cells predicted by computer simulation turns out to correspond equally well with the reality of a great diversity of other organisms. Order, biologically plausible order, says Kauffman, emerges spontaneously, it crystallizes at a certain parameter value.