At Home in the Universe , however, embraces a wider public. Kauffman tries to show how self-organization can play a role in evolution and its interaction with natural selection. It is this mechanism which makes the guiding hand of God, or an underlying rational plan, superfluous in the explanation of the perceived order. Kauffman, however, gives a restricted meaning to self-organisation. As he formulates it, natural selection is a historical process.
Natural selection is an opportunistic process.
If evolution were to repeat itself, it is more than likely that the outcome would not be the same as the present result. For example, the chance that certain mutations would occur twice in the same way is inexpressibly small. Natural selection is chance caught on the wing , as Jacques Monod, the French geneticist, phrased it. We, human beings, can count ourselves lucky we exist at all. According to Kauffman, the emphasis which, since Darwin, has been placed on natural selection as a mechanism of evolution, has pushed evolutionist biology too far into the field of historical science.