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VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality
Into 2023, new Major ETI entries herein, along with a dedicated Human Socio-Cultural Evolution in Light of Evolutionary Transitions issue in Royal Society Philosophical Transactions B. (February) add a new substantial basis and report of life's nested emergence from first occasions as it rises, recurs in turn and just now close over our ovo/bio/neuro prodigious pediasphere.
Carmel, Yohay, et al. Human Socio-Cultural Evolution in Light of Evolutionary Transitions: Introduction to the Theme Issue. Royal Society Philosophical Transactions B. February 2023.
With reference to the Major Evolutionary Transitions section above, this 2021 chapter dedicated to our human individual selves and onto our ascencant local and global humankind speciesphere, aka ethnic and Earthling, will report and document how our personal stage, homo sapiens, is rightly seen as engaged in a further formation of a convergent global, EarthWise phase, a homo to anthropo to Earthropo sapiensance. For a new reference, here next is a latest admission and explanation of this beneficial planetary fulfillment in our midst.
Waring, Timothy and Zachary Wood. Long-term Gene-culture Coevolution and the Human Evolutionary Transition. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. May 2021. University of Maine sustainability scholars provide a thorough study of how our homocene to anthropocene, local to global, emergence can well be appreciated as a further spherical scale. A bibliography from Alfred Kroeber and Herbert Spencer to current work conveys how such a “superorganic” phase has long been suggested. Herein, a historic passage from genetic to cultural “inheritance,” from genome to memory, is found to be a prime causal rationale. Thus we reach Section 4. Rethinking the Human Evolutionary Transition in Individuality. But as we often say, it would be of much benefit to realize that this planetary progeny appears to be learning and gaining knowledge by her/his own self.
And to properly represent both gender halves of the species, sky, and ecosmos, we take license to dub her/his as WumanKinder. By changing one letter, its full makeup of men and women, complementary archetypes of feminine anima and masculine animus, can compose a whole familial, sustainable wiseworld. We also capitalize K to identify the fulfillment of life’s evolutionary development which just now may reach a geonatal moment
Integral Microcosmic Persons and EarthKinder: A Personsphere Progeny will cover and convey prominent aspects as perceived in this developmental view. In the context of this documentary site, precious peoples may henceforth understand themselves, in addition, as iconic exemplars of the uniVerse to wumanVerse bigender procreation. The naturome source code influence once again becomes evident across the diverse subject modules, just as everywhere else.
An especial contribution might be made by the content of A Complementarity of Civilizations. As I write in late June, it grieves to see the nuclear Korean lands, arbitarilly divided after WW II as communist North and individualist South, locked in mortal conflict The South Korean flag is vividly graced with the Yin/Yang symbol meant to represent the belief that all things in the universe have two, opposite aspects that cannot exist without the other. It would be a grand resolve if a 2020 dispensation could reveal a universal, bigender reciprocity so these two halves with the same ethnic identity could unite in peaceable harmony.
A. Human/Wuman Beings: Integral Microcosmic Persons
In this extensive survey and passage from life’s deep, intrinsic origins across an episodic developmental emergence we have seen so far how the universal complex network systems are manifestly evident in a genomic way at every prior stage and instance. This next section continues to report how the universal bigender complementarity in its iconic particulate, nodal (male) and relational, connected (feminine) modes are once more in procreative play in all aspects of our own phenomenal personification.
In Integral Human Persons will consider how human beings appear as a true microcosmic exemplar, now set in a temporal procreation. The seven subsections span our individual formation and growth from infancy of bodily self-organization, cerebral cognizance and behavioral mores and onto informed awareness, iconic gender identities, and a novel symbiotic selfhood. A final module will review a lifelong psychic course of individuation as we may realize ourselves as vital participants in an ecosmic self-realization.
1. Systems Physiology and Psychology: Somatic and Behavioral Development
In the 2000s and before, novel “developmental systems theory” by the Indiana University psychologists Esther Thelen and Linda Smith, with collegial others led to a growing perception that the same complex dynamics which self-organize ecosmos and evolution are necessarily in similar effect to guide infant’s and children as they advance in bodily maturation, visual perception, kinetic agility, self-other behaviors and sequential stages of cognitive education.
A companion instance then noted herein is to whole scale revision of our human anatomy and physiology. As select references introduce, it has been found that network phenomena plays an equally vital role’ As our section title notes. These organismic and medical fields are being reconceived as dynamically formed and poised metabolic and skeletal systems. We note the Bar-Nam University biophysicist Shlomo Havlin and Boston University polyscientist Plamen Ivanov as veteran contributors, see A Global Network for Network Medicine by Bradley Maron, et al in npj Systems Biology for the latest goings on.
2020: As the new introduction surveys, here is still another instance whence every aspect of each person’s body, brain and behavior lifelong course from infancy to youth to adulthood has been reconceived and explained by way of the self-organizing dynamic complexity sciences.
Bjorklund, David and Bruce Ellis. Children, Childhood, and Development in Evolutionary Perspective. Developmental Review. 34/3, 2014
Cao, Miao, et al. Developmental Connectomics from Infancy through Early Childhood. Trends in Neuroscience. 40/8, 2019
Crespi, Bernard. Pattern Unifies Autism. Frontiers in Psychiatry. February, 2021.
Dehaene, Stanislav. How We Learn. New York: Viking, 2020.
Hartenstein, Volker and Angelika Stollewerk. The Evolution of Early Neurogenesis. Developmental Cell. 32/4, 2016.
Hunt, Nathaniel, et al. The Influence of Auditory-Motor Coupling on Fractal Dynamics in Human Gait. Nature Scientific Reports. 4/5879, 2014.
Kocoglu, Cemile, et al. How Network-based Approaches can Complement Identification Studies in Frontotemporal Dementia. Trends in Genetics. 38/9, 2022.
Martins, Mauricio, et al. How Children Perceive Fractals: Hierarchical Self-similarity and Cognitive Development. Cognition. 133/10, 2014.
Perszyk, Danielle and Sandra Waxman. Linking Language and Cognition in Infancy. Annual Review of Psychology. 69/231, 2017.
Rolls, Edmund. Cerebral Cortex: Principles of Operation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Silbereis, John, et al. The Cellular and Molecular Landscapes of the Developing Human Central Nervous System. Neuron. 89/2, 2016.
Zhu, Meng and Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz. Principles of Self-Organization of the Mammalian Embryo. Cell. 183/6, 2020.
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2. Systems Neuroscience: Multiplex Networks and Critical Function
W When this certain section to document 21st century findings about every aspect of our brain anatomy and cognitive performance was first posted in 2004, neuroimaging techniques, computational abilities, along with theories of scale-free networks, self-organizing complexities, genetic architectural influences and more were at an early stage. But by 2020, due to thousands of researchers in globally collaborative universities, institutes and brain projects, a broad and deep knowledge has been achieved of how we think, learn, remember, speak, experience, feel, respond, cooperate and be creative. Our intent, as elsewhere, in this resource site is to helf bring this salutary accomplishment into public awareness and beneficial avail.
A brain’s maturation and active cognizance is now seen to arise from a dynamic sequence of multiplex intracies, modules, communities, hubs, linkages which then tend to a self-organized critical poise. As Universality Affirmations also documents, we wish to enter the worldwise discovery that our mental capabilities have been found toseek and perform best at a dynamic balance of more and less coherence (don’t we all know). Another take cites a “chimera” process which goes on in the two states at the same time. In regard, this sensory system has been dubbed a “connectome” akin to other -omic phases.
2020: After intensive research over the past ten years by way of novel, advancing neuroimage techniques together with nonlinear complexity integrations, our human cerebral faculty and cognitive function have become a truly iconic microcosm. In parallel fashion, artificial intelligence AI has set aside a machine basis for neural network topologies and processes as they gain wide application from quantum to cultural phases.
Ariswalla, Xerxes and Paul Verschure. The Global Dynamical Complexity of the Human Brain. Applied Network Science. Online December, 2016.
Ascoli, Giorgio. Trees of the Brain, Roots of the Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015.
Bassett, Danielle and Olaf Sporns. Network Neuroscience. Nature Neuroscience. 20/3, 2017.
Betzel, Richard. Network Neuroscience and the Connectomics Revolution. arXiv:2010.01591.
Baumgarten, Lorenz and Stefan Bornholdt. Critical Excitation-Inhibition Balance in Dense Neural Networks. arXiv:1903.12632.
Cocchi, Luca, et al. Criticality in the Brain. arXiv:1707.05952.
Dresp-Langley, Birgitta. Seven Properties of Self-Organization in the Human Brain. Big Data and Cognitive Computing. 4/2, 2020.
Fornito, Alex, et al. Bridging the Gap between Connectome and Transcriptome. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 23/1, 2019.
Kirchhoff, Michael. Predictive Brains and Embodied, Enactive Cognition. Synthese. 195/6, 2018.
Majhi, Soumen, et al. Chimera States in Neuronal Networks. Physics of Life Reviews. September, 2018.
Seung, Sebastian. Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes us Who We Are. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
Vazquez-Rodriguez, Bertha, et al. Stochastic Resonance at Criticality in a Network Model of the Human Cortex. Nature Scientific Reports. 7/13020, 2017.
Wang, Jilin, et al. Non-equilibrium Critical Dynamics of Bursts in θ and δ Rhythms as Fundamental Characteristic of Sleep and Wake Micro-architecture. PLoS Computational Biology. November, 2019.
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3. A Complementary Brain and Thought Process
While Emergent Bicameral Brain above reported a consistent presence of bilateral faculties across evolutionary animal lineages, this section records their developmental fulfillment in human beings with distinctive left and right hemisphere qualities. While long intimated, scientific proof began in the 1960s by way of the CalTech neuroscientist Roger Sperry. Into the 2010s, after decades of clinical and neuroimaging studies, an actual double, reciprocal asymmetry has been well quantified, as these citations convey. In general, the left side focuses on finer, discrete objects out of context, with the right half complement connecting the dots within a holistic field of view.
In recent years, additional takes upon alternative, cerebral archetypes have come into play. A “dual process” model due to Jonathan Evans, Daniel Kahneman, and others has conceived a slow (right) and fast (left) thinking version. These phases proceed in our daily cognizance, as they alsooccur in an evolutionary and historic train of wider image perception first with later quick detail attention. Another neural model is based on dorsal and ventral cognitive streams, see Marianne Wolf, Stephen Grossberg, Tara McHugh, Randall O’Reilly and others. Again the ventral component attends to What aspects such as words or events, while the dorsal path is contributes vital Where, Why contexts and meanings.
As another feature and corollary, conversational language is likewise facilitated by dual script and score modes. Along with literal speech and alphabetic text, a left brain specialty, a right side rythmic prosody is crucial for full communicative discourse. For example see Tecumseh Fitch, Nicola Clayton, Kevin Laland and others whence bodily hand gestures and dance movements are needed to convey for an overall message. And once more, these modes appear in a melodic to linguistic evolutionary sequence. In sum once again, a One Code litany of agent and relation, entity and empathy, network node and link, physical particle and wave, political conservative or liberal and so ever on continues to be just now affirmed across a procreative ecosmos.
2020: By virtue of this microcosmic archetypal, bicameral reciprocity in our very cerebral endowment, a prime evidential basis is achieved by which to identify and gain a deep familial relation to a conducive macocosm. That is to say as above so below, each and everyone of us is truly an iconic, biconic and triconic exemplary uniVerse.
Albouy, Philippe, et al. Distinct Sensitivity to Spectrotemporal Modulation Supports Brain Asymmetry for Speech and Melody. Science. 367/1043, 2020.
Crespi, Bernard, et al. Spirituality, Dimensional Autism, and Schizotypal Traits. PLoS One. March, 2019.
Filippi, Piera. Emotional and Interactional Prosody across Animal Communication Systems. Frontiers of Psychology. September 26, 2016.
Fitch, W. Tecumseh. Dance, Music, Meter and Groove. Frontiers of Human Neuroscience. March 1, 2016.
Furtak, Marcin, et al. The Forest, the Trees, or Both? Hierarchy and Interactions between Gist and Object Processing during Perception of Real-world Scenes. Cognition. Vol. 221, April, 2022.
Grossberg, Stephen. Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.
Hartwigsen, Gesa, et al. How does Hemispheric Specialization Contribute to Human-defining Cognition Neuron. 109/13, 2021.
McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
Milli, Smitha, et al. A Rational Reinterpretation of Dual-Process Theories. Cognition. Vol. 217, October, 2021.
Moskovitz, Ted, et al. A Unified Theory of Dual-Process Control. arXiv:2211.07036.
O'Reilly, Randall, et al. The Structure of Systematicity in the Brain. arXiv.2108.03387.
Schore, Allan. The Development of the Unconscious Mind. New York: Norton, 2019.
Tadic, Bosiljka, et al. Functional Geometry of Human Connectomes. Nature Scientific Reports. 9/12060, 2019.
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4. Conscious Integrated Information Knowledge
Circa 2010, Giulio Tononi, Larissa Albantakis, Christoph Koch, Bernard Baars, Tim Palmer and others have engaged theoretical and experimental reasons that have since given knowing consciousness a physical essence. (An Intrinsic Consciousness has more about how a natural ecosmic source is evident.) The Integrated Information phrase was added to the title to represent this popular mathematic explanation for how our daily noosphere arises by way of a parallel, episodic reinforcement of complexity and consciousness. In a broad view this tandem interaction graces both our own senses, and distinguishes an evolutionary ascent to our worldwide moment. Another main model is known as the Global Workspace Theory whence thoughts are collected so as to enter aware notice.
2020: For this bidecadal review, a definitive progress from fleeting, sideline glimpses to knowledgable senticence accepted as a respectable international endeavor is well in place. By a 2020 revolution, a natural genesis comes alive and personal. A once and future sense of an actual ecosmic consciousness which finds its self-recognition in phenomenal human beings is at last affirmed.
Albantakis, Larissa, et al. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) 4.0: Formulating the Properties of Phenomenal Existence in Physical Terms. arXiv:2212.14787.
Blum, Lenore and Manual. A Theory of Consciousness from a Theoretical Computer Science Perspective. PNAS. 119/21, 2022.
Cleeremans, Axel, et al. Learning to be Conscious. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. December, 2019.
Ginsburg, Simona and Eva Jablonka. The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019.
Kim, Hyoungkyu and UnCheol Lee. Criticality as a Determinant of Integrated Information in Human Brain Networks. Entropy. 21/10, 2019.
Koch, Christof. The Feeling of Life Itself. Cambridge: MIT Preaa, 2019.
Marshall, William, et al. System Integrated Information. arXiv:2212.14537
Mashour, George, et al. Conscious Processing and the Global Neuronal Workspace.. Neuron. 105/5, 2020.
Palmer, Tim. Human Creativity and Consciousness. arXiv:2002.03738.
Popiel, Nicholas, et al. The Emergence of Integrated Information, Complexity, and “Consciousness” at Criticality. Entropy. 22/3, 2020.
Tononi, Giulio, et al. Only What Exists can Cause: An Intrinsic View of Free Will. arXiv:2206.02069.
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5. Half the UniVerse: A Woman's 2020 Wisdome
As we consider individual persons, the most significant feature of anyone’s life is surely their gender. As well known, feminine and masculine identity roles have long been burdened with tribal and cultural agendas, academic distortions, male definitions and resultant abusive injustice. We are aware of the September 2017 Scientific American Gender issue and do not wish to add another opinion on the contentious subject. Rather, into these later 2010s, via an emergent, bicameral humankinder it might be finally possible to reach an innate phenomenal basis for egalitarian complementarities. As this resource tries to document, the worldwise discovery of a greater organic genesis which exists on its own (a woman’s ecosmos) can illuminate natural bigender principles, an ecosmic complementarity, as they array across, distinguish and inform a familial procreation.
This radical difference can be viewed from a number of once and future areas. As noted in Cosmome Code and throughout, an independent generative source which repeats in kind everywhere is now known as a dynamic interplay of two prime modes of relational linkages and nodal agents. As the nonlinear sciences of self-organizing complex adaptive networks abstractly express, each scale and instance from cosmos to culture is composed of dual dot, particle, entity component and relational, communicative, modular, associative modes, roles or phases. One may cite particle and wave, neuron and axon, DNA nucleotides and AND regulation, an Ubuntu me + We = US, and so on over an infinite recurrence.
From another aspect, an evolutionary radiation across creaturely forms from earliest rudiments of a double neural faculty is now well proven, see Emergent Bicameral Brain. Moreover, the same left side specific detail focus and right contextual field holds from invertebrates to our sapiens. We next record a perennial philosophy with a core essence of an anima/animus reciprocity from microcosm to macrocosm. Yin + yang = Tao, each with a modicum of the other, may be the most familiar. Another emergent manifestation seem in effect on a civilizational scale by the quantified presence east and west, south and north archetypal hemispheres. Moving on, confluence of studies and accounts contribute more evidence. On average male brains are larger than females, but their left and right hemispheres are less connected. Women, however, have a larger corpus callosum and are found to avail both sides in concert. As a result, women’s brains have a superior composite faculty since they need to take in both trees and the whole forest. Might one suggest a contrast phrase of Warrior and Worrier?
2020: We reach this most important section of human gender studies. Again we do not seek to define or categorize, but to respectfully consider an incarnate guidance by way of a phenomenal universe to human bigender complementarity. As the yin/yang Tao image ever depicts, the certain roles or modes are actively malleable. (I write in November as as awful election pits men vs. women in win/lose conflict.) One might cite warrior or worrier, particle or wave, node/link, the list goes on, while a future for children lies in the balance. If our whole bicameral sapiensphere can come to her/his own Sophian wisdom, these polarities might be resolved by a viable me + We = US, fellows + mellows = knowledge. And so on triality.
Adenzato, Mauro, et al. Gender Differences in Cognitive Theory of Mind.. Nature Scientific Reports. 7/41219, 2017.
Cahill, Larry. An Issue Whose Time Has Come. Journal of Neuroscience Research. 95/1-2, 2017.
Cochran, Tracy, ed. The Divine Feminine Parabola: The Search for Meaning.. 41/1, Spring, 2016.
Feminist, Alternatives. My Dream is to be Bold: Our Work to End Patriarchy. Cape Town, RSA: Pambazuka Press, 2011.
Grosz, Elizabeth. The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
Gur, Ruben and Raquel Gur. Complementarity of Sex Differences in Brain and Behavior. Journal of Neuroscience Research. 95/1-2, 2017.
Keresztes, Laszlo, et al. Identifying Super-Feminine, Super-Masculine and Sex-Defining Connections in the Human Braingraph. arXiv:1912.02291.
MacGregor, Sherilyn, ed. Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment. London: Routledge, 2017.
Naranjo, Claudio. The Patriarchal Mind as the Root of Interpersonal and Social Pathologies. World Futures. November, 2017.
Scheuringer, Andrea et al. Recruiting the Right Hemisphere: Sex Differences in Inter-Hemisphere Communication. Brain and Language. August, 2020.
Sigurdardottir, Johanna. Give Woman a Chance, and They Will Change the World. New York Times. September 17, 2018.
Tadic, Bosiljka, et al. Functional Geometry of Human Connectome and Robustness of Gender Differences. arXiv:1904.03399.
Wang, Robin. Yinyang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
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6. Our Holosymbiotic Personal Selves
As evolutionary life stirs to self-awareness, the broad field of human psychology sought to understand our human mental milieu, behaviors, emotions, and more with reference to anatomical, biochemical and genetic substrates. A first concern was to identify and mitigate the psychic maladies that inflict night and day. In the 1980s a confluence of neuroscience, linguistics, comprehension, artificial intelligence, and philosophy became known as cognitive science. Humanistic and transpersonal versions began shift the focus from deficits to positive enhancement.
This emdeavor often divides into camps of nature vs. nurture. One side, under rubrics of nativism, essentialism or rationalism, argues that preset programs govern. The other, variously behaviorism, constructivism or empiricism, contends that people make life up due to external influences as they go along. In the 1990s and 2000s an “evolutionary psychology” traced Darwinian roots for paternal investment, mate choice, altruism, rank, prejudice and so on. Another view conceived mental capacity as a congress of “modules” or “mental organs” to solve adaptive problems or deal with new experience. This section contains an array of references across these earlier versions.
Into the 2010s, individual identity studies have entrained the sciences of complex network systems as ourselves arise from and be sustained by the ecosmic self-organized, fractal, autopoietic developmental course as everywhere else. As the title notes, by way of Scott Gibert, Jan Sapp and others, our evolutionary result could be appreciated as a communal symbiotic soma of many modules from bacteria to organelles unto whole entities. A similar observance led to a “human microbiome” view as Ed Yong describes. Later on, a relational, extended sense (Anna Ciaunica, Andy Clark) took hold for peoples quite abide in fluid group settings (me + We = US).
But by 2023 our title can post a “MicroEcosmic” addition to note this actual significance As evidence, we make note of four women and four men whose scientific work and personal profile appears on the Quanta Magazine online site. As peoples arise from life’s long nested evolution and now join a worldwise Earthumanity, they seem to be endowed with awesome abilities to inquire, explore, measure, quantify, iterate and learn about any depth and breadth of a temporal multiUniVersal spacescape. In a time still beset by archaic beliefs, this awesome expansion (sinners to winners) can inspire and empower a turn from war to peace as Earthlings embark on an ordained project of ecosmic self-description, realization, record and affirmation (see 2024 essay).
A Multitalented Scientist Seeks the Origins of Multicellularity. February 21, 2024. Cassandra Extavour, Harvard University evolutionary geneticist
To See Black Holes in Stunning Detail, She Uses ‘Echoes’ Like a Bat. February 12, 2024. Erin Kara, MIT astrophysicist
Starfish Whisperer Develops a Physical Language of Life. January 11, 2023. Nikta Fakhri, MIT biophysicist
The Physicist Who Glues Together Universes. May 25, 2023. Renate Loll, Radboud University mathematical cosmologist
The Mathematician Who Finds the Poetry in Math and the Math in Poetry. January 12, 2024. Sarah Hart, Gresham College, London
Andreas Wagner Pursues the Secrets to Evolutionary Success. August 15, 2023. University of Zurich evolutionary biologist
An Explorer of Abyssal Depths Looks to Oceans on Other Worlds. June 7, 2023. Chris German, Woods Hole marine geochemist
An Applied Mathematician with an Unexpected Toolbox. March 1, 2023. Lek-Heng Lim, University of Chicago
Geneticist Awarded Nobel Prize for Studies of Extinct Human Ancestors. October 3, 2022. Svante Paabo, MPI Evolutionary Anthropology
Bolis, Dimitris and Leonhard Schilbach. I Interact Therefore I Am: The Self as an Historical Product of Dialectical Attunement. Topoi. 39/2, 2020.
Cambray, Joseph and Leslie Sawin, eds. Research in Analytical Psychology: Applications from Scientific, Historical, and Cross-Cultural. London: Routledge, 2018
Ciaunica, Anna. The Relational Self: Basic Forms of Self-Awareness. Topoi. 39/2, 2020.
Gilbert, Scott, et al. A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals. Quarterly Review of Biology. 87/4, 2012.
Heersmink, Richard. Varieties of the Extended Self. Consciousness and Cognition September, 2020.
Laland, Kevin and Amanda Seed. Annual Review of Psychology. 72/689, 2020.
Moura, Joelson, et al. Theoretical Insights of Evolutionary Psychology. Evolutionary Biology. January, 2020.
O'Malley, Maureen. From Endosymbiosis to Holobionts. Journal of Theoretical Biology. Online March, 2017.
Rees, Tobias, et al. How the Microbiome Challenges Our Concept of Self. PLoS Biology. February, 2018
Thagard, Paul. The Self as a System of Multilevel Interacting Mechanisms. Philosophical Psychology. 27/2, 2014.
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B. EarthKinder: A Personsphere Progeny
The first four sections of Part VI, Earth Life Emergence, documented how common, genome-like self-organizing forms and functions underlie, impel and distinguish a nested evolution from original conceptions to a viable biosphere. Integral Persons contained much evidence for bigender individuals as active, reciprocal exemplars of and participants in a self-making Earthly and Ecosmic genesis.
A further, sequential transition seems to be going on to an integral super-organic phase as if a planetary progeny. Earth is a finite globe which serves to compress our hyper-interconnected humanity into a whole somatic and cerebral physiosphere, along with a collaborative knowledge, and fledgling self-identity. This multipart section covers aspects of a linguistic cultural code, human societies as complex adaptive systems, a worldwide anatomy and metabolism, east/west and south/north bicameral civilizations, as also evident in world religions. The stage is then set to consider, in retrospect, how the long travail of world macrohistory may appear as a relative psychic individuation.
1. A Cultural (Geonome) Code : Systems Linguistics
This is an eclectic section much about human language and communication across its many aspects and versions. A companion resource is Iteracy: Rosetta Ecosmos Textuality above. The significant import is that even such a far removed domain can yet be seen to manifest the universal dynamic, self-organizing, genetic-like system. Its influential presence is noticed in the evolution of human language with regard to constructive grammar and syntax, along with informational content, and onto script and speech complements. Personal conversation and even our historic literary corpus are found to have a congruent heritage. And within this website compass, one is prompted to add a “Systems Linguistics” phrase. We also seek to broach an emergent transition to a global “geonome” identity for our Earth learn accumulated repository.
2020: As we continue to report how complex network systems are informing and being applied in every natural and social realm, this section shows that even human literate human cultures and conversational dialogue can (necessarily) be seen as an exemplary instance. Many studies have found textual books and communicative speech to quite hold to and display fractal, self-organized similarities. Within our Earthomo compass as a major emergent transition, could a “geonome” lingua franca be considered so as to identify a global accumulated knowledge repository and naturome narrative?
Brand, C. O., et al. Analogy as a Catalyst for Cumulative Cultural Evolution. Trends in Cognitive Science. March, 2021.
Diessel, Holger. The Grammar Network: How Linguistic Structure is Shaped by Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Fabbro, Franco. The Nature and Function of Languages. Language. 7/4, 2022.
Gontier, Nathalie, et al. Introduction: Language and Worldviews. Topoi. 41/3, 2022.
Heintz, Christophe and Thom Scott-Phillips. Expression Unleashed: The Evolutionary and Cognitive Foundations of Human Communication. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.January 2022)
Kirby, Simon. Culture and Biology in the Origins of Linguistic Structure. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 24/1, 2017.
MacWhinney, Brian and William O’Grady, eds. The Handbook of Language Emergence. New York: Wiley, 2015.
Oudeyer, Pierre-Yves, et al. Computational and Robotic Models of Early Language Development. arXiv:1903.10246.
Raimondi, Vincenzo. The Bio-Logic of Languaging and its Epistemological Background. Language Sciences. Online March, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna. Innate Conceptual Primitives Manifested in the Languages of the World and in Infant Cognition. Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence, eds. The Conceptual Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015.
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2. Complex Local to Global Network Biosocieties
This is an umbrella section for many exemplary aspects of smaller and larger human habitations. As the case with personal psychologies above, the growing application of nonlinear science to the multi-faceted field of sociology has also led to a notice of a common, innate mathematical basis. Rather than one thing after another sans any deeper context, a global vista can retrospectfully perceive how complex dynamic systems likewise self-organize into an exemplary shape and interaction of groups, assemblies, settlements and cities. A steady, nested scale then ranges from a few members to a metropolis. As introduced in Organic Societies earlier, bounded communities again evolve toward a composite organism-like cognitive coherence. As various papers report, from political elections, sporting events, social media, financial commerce, to migrations, and even battlefield chaos, can yet be to exhibit found a constant mathematical format.
2020: To move on, multiplex, linguistic near and far cultures have likewise been reinterpreted by way of the same nonlinear self-organizing network systems. The diverse worldwide project also draws on algorithmic programs and a statistical physics depth. As Frank Schweitzer, Matjaz Perc, Poleminia Amazeen, Dirk Helbing, Neil Johnson and many others advise, by a proper, respectful understanding of intrinsic forces and formations, a much better understanding of and guidance for our neighborhood and national abidances can be achieved. Apropos, an intense effort to study the COVID epidemic by way of topological complexities has identified consistent profiles for disease vectors, intensities and patterings. The next Planetary Physiosphere section surveys further evidence across many scales from villages to urban centers.
Amazeen, Poleminia. From Physics to Social Interactions: Scientific Unifications via Dynamics. Cognitive Systems Research. 52/640, 2018.
Boon, Eva, et al, eds. Foundations of Cultural Evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. May, 2021.
Contoyiannis, Y., et al.Self-Organized Criticality in an Epidemic Spread Model. arXiv:2004.00682.
Corbetta, Alessandro and Federico Toschi. Physics of Human Crowds Annual Review of Condensed Physics. 14/311, 2023.
Drozdz, Stanislaw, et al. Complexity in Economic and Social Systems. Entropy. April, 2020.
Hall, Gavin and William Bialek. The Statistical Mechanics of Twitter. arXiv:1812.07029.
Hu, Chin-Kun. Universality and Scaling in Human and Social Systems. arXiv:1808.04675.
Jagiello, Robert, et al. Tradition and Invention: The Bifocal Stance Theory of Cultural Evolution. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. April, 2022.
Jusup, Marko, et al. Social Physics. arXiv: 2110.01866.
Muthukrishna, Michael, et al. How Culture Drives Brain Expansion, Sociality, and Life History. PLoS Computational Biology. November, 2018.
Notamuzi, Daniele, et al. Universality, Criticality and Complexity of Information Propagation in Social Media. arXiv:2109.00116.
O’Madagain, Cathal and Michael Tomasello. Shared Intentionality, Reason-Giving and the Evolution of Human Culture. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. December, 2021.
Perc, Matjaz, et al. Statistical Physics of Human Cooperation. Physics Reports. Online May, 2017.
Schlapfer, Markus, et al. The Universal Visitation Law of Human Mobility. Nature. 593/522, 2021.
Schweitzer, Frank. Group Relations, Resilience and the I Ching. arXiv:2204.09330.
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3. Planetary Physiosphere: Anatomics, Economics, Urbanomics
Historians, architects, and writers have often noted that our composite human societies, especially in urban settings, might be seen in their material circulations, skeletal infrastructure, and cognitive cultures to take on a likeness of the anatomy, metabolism and nervous system of a developing organism. As the title cites, into the 21st century settlements from villages to cities have equally been described dynamic exemplars of nature’s complex, fractal, cellular, network self-organization. A corollary is then their intentional recreation in an organic way (car arteries, speed limits as blood pressure), but seems inhibited by older mechanistic models. So once more in our homo to anthropo sapiens emergent transition, our abidances are vibrant manifestations of life and mind writ larger. This section also reports a shift in finance and commerce from equilibrium models as another dynamic complexity revision, aka econophysics.
2020: While cities swell and suburbs sprawl, a commonwealth of analytic and holistic studies have found our habitations from villages to urban centers can well represent one more epitome of nature’s organic, self-organized fractal network complexities. Together with cellular automata methods, even this intense human phase can gain a broader and deeper coherence by way of reliable formations and activities. The take home promise would be an ability to intentionally avail their presence and guidance from sustainable person to planet scales.
Batty, Michael. Inventing Future Cities. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018.
Carbone, Anna, et al. Journal of Physics: Complexity. June, 2022.
Cherednik, Ivan. Modeling the Waves of COVID 19. Acta Biotheoretica. December 2021.
Cogdell, Christina. Toward a Living Architecture?: Complexism and Biology in Generative Design. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
D’Acci, Luce, ed. The Mathematics of Urban Morphology. Springer: Birkhauser, 2019.
Domingues, Guilherme, et al. City Motifs as Revealed by Similarity between Hierarchical Features. arXiv:2204.09104.
Gelfand, Michele. The Relationship Between Cultural Tightness - Looseness and COVID-19 Cases and Deaths.. Lancet Planetary Health. January, 2021.
Gonzalrz, Leonardo, et al. Modeling an Urban Highway: A Statistical Physics Point of View. arXiv:2208.13620.
Lobo, Jose, et al. Urban Science: Integrated Theory from the First Cities to Sustainable Metropolises. SSRN Electronic Journal. January, 2020.
Portugali, Juval, ed. Handbook on Cities and Complexity. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2022.
Pumain, Denise and Juste Raimbault. Perspectives on Urban Theories. arXiv:1911.02854.
Schlapfer, Markus, et al. The Hidden Universality of Movement in Cities. arXiv:2002.06070.
Tirico, Michele, et al. Morphogenesis of Street Networks: A Reaction-Diffusion System for Self-Organized Cities. arXiv:2111.03544.
Yang, Vicky Chuqiao, et al. Scaling and the Universality of Function Diversity across Human Organizations. arXiv:2208.06487.
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4. A Complementarity of Civilizations: East and West is Best
“East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet” wrote Rudhyar Kipling long ago. Nowadays many research studies in comparative social psychology report that western and eastern cultures do indeed generally reflect polar autonomous individual or communal group attributes. This website module serves to document how the universal archetypes are manifestly evident even on a global stage. But these reciprocal phases are rarely appreciated and often set in opposition with strife and injustice. If civilizations that are long bent on “clashing” could be seen as natural complements, a path to their salutary mutual reconciliation might result.
And another, equal area of continental contrast with much violence and strife is post-colonial Africa, along with South America. A lesser known but crucial finding is that the same complements seem hold for Southern and Northern hemispheres (Stephanie De Oliveira, Richard Nisbett). A resolve might also accrue here, with an especial avail for better racial understandings (see World Philosophy, Molefi Kete Asante, Maulana Karenga, Messay Kebede, et al). Such instances among many cry out for a dispensation and promise of a nascent worldwide wumankinder knowledge.
2020: As we have so far referenced, nature’s independent generative code is in exemplary effect from galaxies and life’s origin all the way through an evolutionary gestation to our current Earthomo personsphere. This section documents how it is manifestly evident even on the scale of global East/West and South/North complements. As these 100+ entries convey, just as our cerebral brains come with bicameral hemispheres, so the same reciprocal individual/community archetypes are in distinctive, albeit fluid, presence across ethnic, national and continental cultures. And once more if we just might gain and ground such understandings, the many clashing polarities that so confound us could at last be resolved.
Bao, Yan, et al. Complementarity as Generative Principle. Frontiers in Psychology. Online May, 2017.
De Oliveira, Stephanie and Richard Nisbett. Beyond East and West: Cognitive Style in Latin America. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. 48/10, 2017.
Han, Shihui. The Sociocultural Brain: A Cultural Neuroscience Approach to Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Henrich, Joseph and Michael Muthukrishna. The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation. Annual Review of Psychology. 72/207, 2020.
Kuhnen, Ulrich and Marieke van Egmond. Learning: A Cultural Construct. Proust, Joelle and Martin Fortier, eds. Metacognitive Diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
McGilchrist, Iain. Tending to the World. Robinson, Sarah Robinson and Juhani Pallasmaa, eds. Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015.
Nisbett, Richard. Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2015.
Poppel, Ernst. East of West, West of East: A Matter of Global and Local Identity. Cognitive Processing. 19/S.1, 2018.
Rozin, Paul, et al. Right:Left :: East:West. Individuals from East Asian and South Asian Cultures Emphasize Right Hemisphere Functions in Comparison to Euro-American Cultures. Neuropsychologia. 90/3, 2016.
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5. Bicameral World Religions
The great Asian and Abrahamic world faiths arose in a first “axial period” circa 500 B.C. to 700 A.D. Within the website theme, it is offered that a worldwide complementarity might also occur between Western and Eastern belief and doctrine. As scholars note, these spiritual hemispheres align with basic responses or dichotomies of God and the human, heaven or earth, linear or cyclical time, and so on. For Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism, in broad survey, the numinous cosmos is animate in kind, a viable organism. A quintessence is original and ascendant mind, harmony and balance exist on their phenomenal own. As noted above, Eastern cultures are more communal or wave-like with an emphasis on group vaues.
In our broad gloss, Western values and creeds mostly take to an opposite, particulate, material mode. A person is separate, apart from God, the earth somehow flawed, fallen. To equate oneself with God is heretical. For Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the Divine is transcendent but remote; one is a sinful mendicant, the world has little value in itself. At the Western pole, an extroverted individual supersedes social concerns. A unique instance may be the Muslim milieu, which although an Abrahamic faith sees itself as ‘neither east nor west’ (William Chittick, Tu Weiming). If we might extend the brain hemisphere analogy, Islam’s geographical location from Morocco to Indonesia is somewhat where an interbridging ‘corpus callosum’ would be. And such speculations are respectfully offered as an example of what might be gained from a humankind vista.
In addition, this outline section for global belief systems also records a 21st century theological resolution known as Pan-en-theism. Rather than older Pantheism for an encompassing divine essence, it is being realized that numinosity must abide both in paternal transcendence and maternal procreative immanence. Prime works in regard are Panentheism by John Cooper, and Panentheism Across the World's Traditions, edited by Loriliai Biernacki and Philip Clayton.
2020: In accord with the civilization section above, further dual individual and integral persuasions can be found to distinguish their diverse religious heritages.
Biernacki, Loriliai and Philip Clayton, eds. Panentheism Across the World's Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Choi, Kwang Sun. Ecozoic Spirituality. New York: Peter Lang, 2015.
Cohen, Adam, et al. Religion and Culture: Individualism and Collectivism in the East and West. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. Online August, 2016.
Jaeshik, Shin. Mapping One World: Religion and Science from an East Asian Perspective. Zygon. 51/1, 2016.
Knysh, Alexander. Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.
McGilchrist, Iain. God, Metaphor, and the Language of the Hemispheres. Chilton, Paul and Monika Kopytowska, eds. Religion, Language, and the Human Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Saroglou, Vassilis, et al. Believing, Bonding, Behaving, and Belonging: The Cognitive, Emotional, Moral, and Social Dimensions of Religiousness across Cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. 51/7-8, 2020.
Shanta, Bhakti Niskama. Life and Consciousness: The Vedantic View. Communicative & Integrative Biology. 8/5, 2015.
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6. Contrasts of Religion and Science
Endeavors to integrate and rejoin scientific and religious views have long been underway but the project is daunted because the late materialist, mechanical scheme which concludes that no such numinous, purposed milieu exists at all. Signs of an ordained design by way of the “anthropic principle” are an ongoing aspect, see the section above. Glimpses of an innately self-organizing cosmos occur but the waxing realization of a genesis universe whereof Earth and human have intrinsic, cocreative value has not yet registered.
2020: This active field has a copious literature which is surveyed and sampled here. However, as the introduction notes, a problem persists and inhibits because past scientific denials of any universe and human essence or purpose, which lately worsen, are just unreconcilable with any belief in a numinous, phenomenal creation.
Conradie, Ernst, ed. Creation and Salvation. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012.
Conway Morris, Simon. Darwin’s Compass: How Evolution Discovers the Song of Creation. Manning, Russell Re and Michael Bryne, eds. Science and Religion in the Twenty-First Century. London: SCM Press, 2013.
Gilbert, Scott. Wonder and the Necessary Alliances of Science and Religion. Euresis Journal. Volume 4, 2013.
Pruett, Dave. Reason and Wonder: A Copernican Revolution in Science and Spirit. New York: Praeger, 2012.
Rutman, Joel Yehudah. Why Evolution Matters: A Jewish Approach. London: Valentine Mitchell, 2014.
Sacks, Jonathan. The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning. New York: Schocken Books, 2012.
Sloan, Phillip, et al, eds. Darwin in the Twenty First Century: Nature, Humanity, and God. Norte Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015.
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7. Systems History: Personal and Planetary Individuation
Historians and philosophers have long sought to discern deep forces and trends that might underlie, impel and trace the arduous course of peoples, cultures, nations, migrations and civilizations. Because these efforts are fraught with issues, baggage, sparse signs, a quest for such a “metanarrative” has been mostly abandoned. But as global complex self-organization theories may now augur for a phenomenal genesis universe, the project may be actually possible. A prime scholar in regard has been the University of Connecticut historian Peter Turchin and colleagues through writings and a Cliodynamics: Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History journal.
Another 21st century approach is the popular Big History vista founded in the 2000s by the Australian historian David Christian. The intent is to necessarly join and root our momentary human phase into the cosmic evolutionary processes it arose from. See also Universal Evolution in Chapter III for contributions by Russian scholars to this perspective.
And for another view, our history/herstory abidance might be seen as a mythic quest for personal and planetary individuation. Wumanity’s ephocal traverse rises from a prehistoric animate, mostly maternal phase onto millennia of patriarchal cast as anima and animus interact, separate and conflict. As well known, male mentalities rule and rage to this day, vitally in need of feminine mediation. As Richard Tarnas, Suzanne Kirschner, Freya Mathews, Arne Naess, and ancient wisdom illume, individual selves, whole earth life and maybe an eosmos seem engaged in a temporal struggle toward viable self-witness, realization, and affirmation.
2020: As religion and science above, this endeavor has issues because while our human/Earth appearance can rightly be traced to ancient cosmic rootings, this vista is beset by olden denials of any greater reality. Our occasion can surely be set in this wider expanse, but that is the end of it. In the meanwhile, an array of science scholars, e.g. at the Santa Fe Institute (David Krakauer, Geoffrey West, et al) are engaging how even one more seemingly chaotic phase can yet reveal inherent complex network systems.
Balbi, Amedeo. A History of Cosmic Habitability. Journal of Big History. 4/2, 2020.
Berzonsky, Carol and Susanne Moser. Becoming Homo Sapiens: Mapping the Psycho-Cultural Transformation in the Anthropocene. Anthropocene. November, 2017.
Boyer, Pascal. Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
Christian, David. Origin Story: A Big History of Everything. New York: Little Brown, 2018.
Clemens, Walter. Complexity Science and World Affairs. Albany: SUNY Press, 2014.
Crawford, Ian. Astrobiology, Big History, and the Social and Intellectual Benefits of the Cosmic Perspective. Journal of Big History. 3/3, 2019.
Korotayev, Andrey and David LePoire, eds. The 21st Century Singularity and Global Futures: A Big History Perspective. International: Springer, 2020.
Krakauer, David, et al, eds. History, Big History, & Metahistory. Santa Fe: SFI Press, 2018.
Spier, Fred. Big History and the Future of Humanity. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.
Turchin, Peter. End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration. New York: Penguin Press, 2023
Zanin, Massimiliano and Johann Martinez. Analysing International Events through the Lens of Statistical Physics: The Case of Ukraine. arXiv:2203.07403.
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