| Sumario: | The article examines the novelty highlighted by Kauffman's researches, that is the fact that large open thermodynamic systems can spontaneously stay in an orderly regime. Such systems can represent the natural source of the order required for a stable self-organization, for homoeostasis and for hereditary variations. The order, emerging in enormous randomly interconnected nets of binary variables, is almost certainly only the precursor of similar orders emerging in all the varieties of complex systems. New foundations could be found for the order pervading the living world also confirming the daring hypothesis, advanced by the great American scholar, according to which Darwinian natural selection is not the only source of order in the biosphere. Thus, the article, by examining the passage from Prigogine's dissipative structures theory to the theory of self-organized Boolean networks, highlights the development of a coherent and continuous line of research which is set to individuate the general principles marking the profound reality of that mysterious self-organization characterizing the complexity of life. Hence, without any claim of being exhaustive, this work constitutes a sort of walk along the evolutionary paths of biological complexity; a walk, that is, which has the intention of examining the various interpretative models, gradually elaborated by different scholars, in order to survey the allegedly Pillars of Hercules of contemporary biology: the mysterious procedures of self-organization.
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