II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

B. The Spiral of Science: Manican to American to Earthicana Phases

Wise, M. Norton, ed. Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on Recent Science. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. An eclectic but timely volume that expresses how the various complexity sciences represent a profound shift in emphasis from physical reduction to emergent self-organization. For example, Alfred Tauber notes that immunology is moving from a self-other view to antibodies as fluid and distributed in a postmodern sense. Richard Doyle, Stefan Helmreich and Claus Emmeche go on to consider the digital simulations of artificial life. But a step not yet taken is to realize these novel approaches imply a quite different, organically developing universe.

Put in the broadest terms, “growing explanations” refers to what may be a sea change in the character of much scientific explanation. Over the past forty years, the hierarchy of the natural sciences has been inverted, putting biology rather than physics at the top, and with this inversion emphasis has shifted from analysis to synthesis. In place of the drive to reduce phenomena from higher-order organization to lower-lying elements as the highest goal of explanation, we see a new focus on understanding how elementary objects get built up – or better, are “grown up” – into complex ones…. (1) Instead of particles all the way down, it would be dynamics all the way up. (19)

Woese, Carl. A New Biology for a New Century. Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews. 68/2, 2004. The University of Illinois evolutionary theorist (1928-2012) finds biological science to have reached an epochal turning point and paradigm shift. The necessary 20th century approach of identifying the molecular, genetic and microbial components has fulfilled its task. But this results in an incomplete, mechanical view of nature. To move forward, a diametric integral vista is called for whereby life’s innate emergence is expressed by the new sciences of self-organizing complexity. And it is just this revolution that Natural Genesis is trying to report and convey. Woese’s important paper is also noted in Part V, A Quickening Evolution, and Part VI, Microbial Colonies.

The molecular cup is now empty. The time has come to replace the purely reductionist “eyes-down” molecular perspective with a new and genuinely holistic, “eyes-up,” view of the living world, one whose primary focus is on evolution, emergence, and biology’s innate complexity. (175) And it is becoming increasingly clear that to understand living systems in any deep sense, we must come to see them not materialistically, as machines, but as (stable) complex, dynamic organization. (176)

Wolchover, Natalie. New Wrinkle Added to Cosmology’s Hubble Crisis. Quanta. February 26, 2020. A news report on a current. hotly disputed, split over two ways to calibrate, quantify and interpret the rate of cosmic expansion. One camp led by Nobel laureate Adam Reiss (Johns Hopkins) uses pulsating stars called cepheids as their standard candle. The other view by Wendy Freeman and Barry Madore (University of Chicago) relies on the dusty Large Magellanic Cloud. For entry technical papers see The Megamaser Cosmology Project at 2001.09213 (AR) and Calibration of the Red Giant Branch at 2002.01550 (WF & BM). A popular discussion is The Cosmic Crisis by Richard Panek in Scientific American (March 2020).

Woolley, Anita and Erica Fuchs. Collective Intelligence in the Organization of Science. Organization Science. 22/5, 2011. Carnegie Mellon University management specialists survey a special issue on the title subject. While it is agreed that teams, groups, and so on, if properly personed, informed, and empowered, can gain capabilities beyond individuals, an academic jargon and bent to over-quantify seems burden their study. And Woolley’s own research (search) has found that women members are vital to success.

Collective intelligence is a potentially powerful concept through which to understand the collaboration, competition, and decision-making processes of complex, adaptive, social systems. (1365)

Wright, Dawn and Shaowen Wang. The Emergence of Spatial Cyberinfrastructure. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 108/5488, 2011. Oregon State University and University of Illinois geoscientists introduce a special section on this historic transition from lone researchers to multi-person teams to instant worldwide alliances.

Cyberinfrastructure integrates advanced computer, information, and communication technologies to empower computation-based and data-driven scientific practice and improve the synthesis and analysis of scientific data in a collaborative and shared fashion. As such, it now represents a paradigm shift in scientific research that has facilitated easy access to computational utilities and streamlined collaboration across distance and disciplines, thereby enabling scientific breakthroughs to be reached more quickly and efficiently. (5488)

Wuketits, Franz. Evolutionary Epistemology and Its Implications for Humankind. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Presently a Director of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition, the Austrian biologist provides a good approach to this endeavor which originated with the American philosopher Donald Campbell and flourished in the 1980's with the intent to provide an evolutionary basis for all manner of behaviors and cultures. But the effort was mostly founded on Darwinian selection alone and has since languished. A significant 2006 revival has occurred, recorded in Gontier, Nathalie, et al herein, founded on dynamical self-organization and other alternatives, now also applied to languages.

Xie, Zheng, et al. Feature Analysis of Multidisciplinary Scientific Collaboration Behaviors. arXiv:1706.05858. National University of Defense Technology and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, researchers consider some 53,000 papers from 1999 to 2013 in the American Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to recreate in much detail the shifting dynamic interactions across every field of study from physics to pharmacology. By so doing, we add that a glimpse of a singular composite learning endeavor by a worldwide humankind becomes quite evident.

Research paradigms of sciences can be classified into four categories, namely theoretical research, experiment, simulation and data-driven. Meanwhile, transdisciplinary disciplines (e. g. systems science) integrate the theoretical and methodological perspectives drawn from all disciplines to build a unified methodology. The universality of research paradigms and transdisciplinary disciplines gives grounds for the interactions and the emergence of giant components in coauthorship networks. (3)

Xie, Zheng, et al. Modeling the Citation Network by Network Cosmology. PLoS One. March 25,, 2015. Chinese mathematicians and computer scientists draw a widest parallel between the cosmic network theories of Dmitri Krioukov, et al (search) with our literary “web of science” publications. Once again, since every scale now seems to spring from and exemplify the one same generative mathematics, human and universe can be found to have the deepest affinity. As this site tries to evoke, here is an epochal, salutary discovery that needs to be realized for all its implications. We post extended quotes in regard.

Random geometric graphs in hyperbolic spaces explain many common structural and dynamical properties of real networks, yet they fail to predict the correct values of the exponents of power-law degree distributions observed in real networks. In that respect, random geometric graphs in asymptotically de Sitter spacetimes, such as the Lorentzian spacetime of our accelerating universe, are more attractive as their predictions are more consistent with observations in real networks. Here we study the navigability of random geometric graphs in three Lorentzian manifolds corresponding to universes filled only with dark energy (de Sitter spacetime), only with matter, and with a mixture of dark energy and matter as in our universe. This result implies that, in terms of navigability, random geometric graphs in asymptotically de Sitter spacetimes are as good as random hyperbolic graphs. It also establishes a connection between the presence of dark energy and navigability of the discretized causal structure of spacetime, which provides a basis for a different approach to the dark energy problem in cosmology. (Abstract)

Random geometric graphs formalize the notion of “discretization” of a continuous geometric space or manifold. Nodes in these graphs are points, sprinkled randomly at constant sprinkling density, over the manifold, thus representing “atoms” of space, while links encode geometry—two nodes are connected if they happen to lie close in the space. These graphs are also a central object in algebraic topology since their clique complexes are Rips complexes whose topology is known to converge to the manifold topology under very mild assumptions. In network science and applied mathematics, random geometric graphs have attracted increasing attention over recent years, since it was shown that if the space defining these graphs is not Euclidean but negatively curved, i.e., hyperbolic, then these graphs provide a geometric explanation of many common structural and dynamical properties of many real networks, including scale-free degree distributions, strong clustering, community structure, and network growth dynamics. Yet more interestingly, these graphs also explain the optimality of many network functions related to finding paths in the network without global knowledge of the network structure. (1)

Yahdijan, Laura, et al. Why Coordinated Distributed Experiments Should Go Global. BioScience. May, 2021. The performance of coordinated distributed experiments designed to compare ecosystem sensitivity to global-change drivers depends on whether they cover a significant proportion of environmental variables. In the present article, we described the planetary distribution of climatic and soil conditions and quantified the main differences among continents. Our results provide a unique vision of climate and soil variability at the world scale and highlight the need to design globally distributed networks. (Abstract excerpt)

The performance of coordinated distributed experiments designed to compare ecosystem sensitivity to global-change drivers depends on whether they cover a significant proportion of environmental variables. In the present article, we described the planetary distribution of climatic and soil conditions and quantified the main differences among continents. Our results provide a unique vision of climate and soil variability at the world scale and highlight the need to design globally distributed networks. (Abstract excerpt)

Yang, Xiaoyu, et al, eds. Guide to e-Science. London: Springer, 2011. As this epochal shift and rise proceeds, an international cadre considers five areas: Sharing and Open Research, Data Intensive e-Science, Collaborative Research, Automation, Reusability and Reproducibility, and e-Science, Easy Science.

Yeo, Richard. Encyclopaedic Visions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. A Griffith University, Queensland, philosopher of science recounts our ancient penchant and quest to gather all extant natural and cultural experience in one corpus edition. A typical chapter narrates Ephraim Chambers’ remarkable 1720s Cyclopedia. A persistent theme has been how to arrange and classify – for example, a leafy tree with a central trunk or a hierarchy of scientific and cultural disciplines. Such efforts were set aside in favor of an alphabetic list, easiest for readers. Although a useful dictionary, the sense of an encompassing design (now a problematic term) became lost.

York, Donald, et al, eds.. The Astronomy Revolution: 400 Years of Exploring the Cosmos. London: Taylor & Francis, 2011. The proceedings of an historic meeting held in Beijing, October 2008, sponsored by the Templeton Foundation and China Xiangshan Science Conference, to mark four centuries after the invention of the telescope. A web page is posted at http://nv400.uchicago.edu. This vista resulted in a broad scientific and conceptual survey of our millennial human enterprise to scan the skies from original Chinese views, Copernican revolutions from solar systems to a nebulous multiverse, along with latest sightings of myriad exoworlds. A sample of papers attests: “From the Language of Heaven to the Rationale of Matter” by Tsung-Dao Lee, “Searching for Other Earths and Life in the Universe,” Geoffrey Marcy, “The Formation and Evolution of Galaxies,” Ben Moore, Sara Seager’s “Exoplanet Atmospheres,” “Multiverse Cosmology” by Paul Davies, theologian Peter Harrison’s “Laws of nature, Moral Order, and the Intelligibility of the Cosmos,” and “Why are the Laws of Nature as They Are?” by George Ellis. Of unique interest was “Cosmos and Humanity in Traditional Chinese Thought” by the Seoul National University historian Yung Sik Kim, which drew from the natural philosophy of Chu Hsi (1130-1200), (see Kim’s 2000 book in regard) which conveys the organic essence of Asian wisdom traditions. We offer a short quote, but its enduring value is seen for human beings, as a manifest natural phenomenon, by its providence of a “cosmic basis for morality.”

The relation between man and the world of heaven-and-earth had many sides. For one, there was the idea of the parallelism of microcosm-macrocosm, i.e., the notion that man as the small world is also the epitome of the great world, heaven-and-earth. A more pronounced aspect of the relationship between man and heaven-and-earth for the traditional Chinese was the idea of the triad of “Heaven-earth-man,” i.e., the notion of the world in which man lives harmoniously between heaven and earth. The basic component of the triad was the idea that heaven-and-earth and man complement each other – heaven-and-earth does not do everything alone: there are some things that heaven-and-earth cannot do, which man does for heaven-and-earth. (Yung Sik Kim, 363)

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