I. Our Planatural Edition: A 21st Century PhiloSophia, Earthropo Ecosmic PediaVersion

B. Anthropocene Sapiensphere: A Major Emergent Transitional Phase

Richardson, Ken. In the Light of the Environment: Evolution through Biogrammars not Programmers. Biological Theory. June, 2020. The emeritus Open University, UK psychologist has for some time (search) felt that current efforts to form a revised, updated evolutionary synthesis continue to miss what moves and informs living organism systems. As this site avers and cites, an array of self-organizing agencies are at generative work prior to selective effects. For this reason, it is necessary to move beyond a genetic basis only, even if expansive. From our late vantage, it would seem that some manner of retained, knowledgeable content which is vital for survival in changing environments is what actually evolves, grows and emerges. For a name, this corpora quality is dubbed a “biogrammar.” We add four quotes about this insightful view.

Biological understanding of human cognitive functions is incomplete because of failure to understand the evolution of complex functions and organisms in general. Here, that failure is attributed to an aspect of the standard neo-Darwinian synthesis, namely commitment to evolution by natural selection of genetic programs in stable environments, a position that cannot easily explain the evolution of complexity. When we turn to consider more realistic, highly changeable environments, however, another possibility becomes clearer. An alternative to genetic programs—dubbed “biogrammars”—is proposed here to deal with complex, changing environments and explain evolving complexity from pre-genetic life to human socio-cognitive functions. (Abstract)

The purpose of this article is to show how these problems really stem from a failure to properly consider the complexity of environments of evolution, especially their changeability. Here it is suggested that what environmental changeability demands is not genetic programs, but inducible covariation grammars (“biogrammars”). By explaining evolving complexity, from primordial origins to human socio-cognition, it is suggested that biogrammars constitute the most interesting aspect of “what has evolved.” (1)

It is in such global patterns that cognition emerges as a distinct biogrammatical level. Sensory stimuli are highly variable and “noisy.” Yet our cognitive experience of the environment is much more stable and consistent. Order is created by ever-updating covariation patterns—cognitive biogrammars—rather than mere neural ones: a new level of
self-organized regulations, creating new levels of environmental predictability. (8)

Evolution by biogrammars explains key transitions to complexity on the basis of a single, unitary but powerful principle. It also puts into clearer context the role of natural selection. Darwin admitted that natural selection might not be the only path to evolution. Already, by 1904, De Vries and others were pointing out that nothing can be selected until it already exists. Self-organizing biogrammars, working with informational structure, create variation and novel adaptations far more rapidly and fruitfully than random genetic mutations and natural selection. (9)

Rifkin, Jeremy. The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2010. Rifkin is an independent social philosopher and commentator who has been turning out insightful, leading edge books for over thirty years. Some of his titles are The Hydrogen Economy 2002, The Age of Access 2000, Biosphere Politics 1991, and Entropy: A New World View 1980. The present large volume might be seen as a 21st century synthesis of these vital themes and issues, which belies a brief capsule. At the book’s website, www.empathiccivilization.com, a detailed Table of Contents can be accessed, along with the complete text displayed in page format.

The treatise not only makes a good case for this imperative revolution, if life and people are to survive and flourish, but revisions the course of history in terms of “Homo Empathicus.” Beyond a chronicle of events, it is retraced across biological, cognitive, psychological, world religion, and economic realms onto the machine industrial revolution that reigns today. Part III: The Age of Empathy (see also Franz de Waal’s same title) is then a manifesto for a planetwide culture and civilization, a reciprocity of ethnic and earthling. A rapacious use of energy and material must be leavened to minimize its wasteful entropic excesses. In its place a “third industrial revolution” of a “distributed capitalism” is advocated, which in “a collaborative and caring world” can value a personal and cooperative quality of life over sheer growth and consumption.

Rifkin, ever the free, clear thinker, adds an essay on The Theatrical Self in an Improvisational Society. Surely the burst in our social network, reality show media, ubiquitous laptop, Blackberry, iPhone and iPad culture redefines what it means to be a person (along with rewiring young brains). Drawing on psychology and sociology, a resolve is offered as The Relational Self in an Interconnected World via a blend of absorbent viewer, immersed in this sensorium, along with a return to and measure of a user’s empowerment and discernment. A final chapter proposes a Biosphere Consciousness, a salutary organism-like viable unity, an “empathic earth” one may say, if we are to make it.

A new science is emerging whose operating principles and assumptions are more compatible with network ways of thinking. The old science views nature as objects; the new science views nature as relationships. The old science is characterized by detachment, expropriation, dissection, and reduction; the new science is characterized by engagement, replenishment, integration, and holism. The old science is committed to making nature productive; the new science to making nature sustainable. The old science seeks power over nature; the new science seeks partnership with nature. The old science puts a premium on autonomy from nature; the new science on reparticipation with nature. (599 – 600)

“The Empathic Civilization is emerging. We are fast extending our empathic embrace to the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the planet. But our rush to universal empathic connectivity is running up against a rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the form of climate change and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?” (616)

Rinaldo, Kenneth. Technology Recapitulates Phylogeny: Artificial Life Art. www.artnode.dk/contri/rinaldo/index.html. A professor of art and technology at Ohio State University cites an historic shift in our universe-view from material reduction to an emergent synthesis akin to a developing embryonic organism. In similar fashion, artistic creations can be seen to vibrantly spring from a blend of digital A-Life and biological technology. A quote from the British developmental biologist Mae-Won Ho is employed in support.

An emphasis on integration over fragmentation, on cooperation rather than competition, on dynamics and process in place of the static and mechanical, on nonlinear distributed interrelationships and emergent properties of collective wholes instead of linear unidirectional or hierarchical control of incidental parts.

Rolston, Holmes III. Three Big Bangs: Matter-Energy, Life, Mind. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. The Colorado State University emeritus philosopher and environmentalist continues in this multiverse century the long tradition from romantic roots to Henry Drummond, William James, Julian Huxley, onto Theodosius Dobzhansky, but now lapsing, to advocate once more such a temporal, processive gestation. Which is again, in like fashion, inferred to have a Divine occasion and tacit guidance as evolving persons now strive for cognizant, moral, attainment. And as so perceived, the vista is presented as another instance of turning to John A. Wheeler’s conducive cosmology of a “mathemorphic” universe which requires human participants to bring it into full being.

Rolston, Holmes, III. Genes, Genesis and God. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. The Colorado State University environmental philosopher offers a prescient reading of evolution as a self-organized, autopoietic procreation of intelligent, personified spirit. In a theological(Pauline) and poetic sense, cosmic and earthly nature ought to be seen much as a process of giving birth.

Roszak, Theodore. The Voice of the Earth. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. At once a lament over the loss of ancient correspondences by an insensate science and a call for their recovery in a nascent organic cosmology. Roszak feels that this wisdom can inform a palliative “ecopsychology.”

Between these two - celestial intelligence and the inner being of humanity - there was said to be a vital link. Macrocosm spoke to microcosm; microcosm reflected macrocosm. The two were in living dialogue. Understanding the universe was a matter of listening, having ears to hear the music of the spheres, the voice of the Earth. (15-16) But sooner or later the greater implications of the ordered and evolving complexity of the universe will have to be faced. It may be that the deep systems of nature, from which our psyche, our culture, and science itself ultimately derive, are the new language through which the Earth once again finds its voice. (18)

Rupp, Joyce. The Cosmic Dance. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002. An illustrated meditation based on Teilhard, Walt Whitman, Thomas Berry, Joanna Macy, Brian Swimme and other visionaries and from the author’s personal experience of absorption in a still developing, dynamical creation.

Russell, Dale. Islands in the Cosmos: The Evolution of Life on Land. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009. Fertile bioplanets are cosmic islands in this opus by the Curator of Paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences which recounts the earth life’s ramifying and emergent florescence across the sequential eons and eras. But in a Foreword, the Cambridge University paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, sets the tone for the book, from whom we quote. For while this courses through the usual crawly creatures, extinct species, and processional ages, something much more is implied. Rather then the vested view of an accidental evolution, innate “inevitabilities” and “directionalities” trace a grand convergence toward a seemingly intended complex and conscious human phenomenon.

For this work, along with Caleb Scharf’s new Exoplanet book herein, and an increasing number gathered on the Natural Genesis website, compose a waxing effort to glimpse, give credence to, and announce a radically new kind of organic creation, “someone in gestation.” A cosmic Copernican Revolution seems in our midst, largely unbeknownst because this time it is due to a bicameral worldwide humankind, from a Ptolemaic male material machine, alien to life, mind and person, to such a progressive embrogeny.

Yet however remote these worlds might, they were a product of evolution, as of course are we. From our privileged perspective, we see them as pregnant with possibilities, a planet that slowly awakens as the first minds begin to stir. Here, surely, is a saga that is even today incompletely told: awareness flickers into existence and intelligences emerge, culminating in the incredible trajectory of human evolution. (x) These inevitabilities not only provide a compass to the Darwinian adventure, but also in revealing directionalities allow us to reconsider the concept of evolutionary progress, not as an artifact of human wish fulfillment but as integral to this tapestry of life. (xi)

Rutherford, Adam. A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes. New York: The Experiment, 2017. The British science writer and producer with a doctorate in genetics from University College London is well qualified to guide this tour from primate to hominid to homo sapiens in terms of their genomic endowments. Two main parts cover this arduous evolution unto historic migrations and diasporas. The olden tree branchings based on fossil finds lately becomes a “murky swamp” of interbreedings by way of ancient DNA sequences. An early section, Learning to Read, alludes that a genetic scriptome, now traced all the way to invertebrates, is the deep language of life by which our humankinder perusal can reveal how we all came to be. But the work still concludes, as if a necessary disclaimer, that Your face, your physiology, your metabolism, experience family, DNA, and your history are the contrivances of cosmic happenstance in a fully indifferent universe (362).

Who are our ancestors? Where did they come from? Geneticists have suddenly become historians, and the hard evidence in our DNA has blown the lid off what we thought we knew. Acclaimed science writer Adam Rutherford explains exactly how genomics is completely rewriting the human story—from 100,000 years ago to the present. A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived will upend your thinking on Neanderthals, evolution, royalty, race, and even redheads. Plus, here is the remarkable, controversial story of how our genes made their way to the Americas—one that’s still being written, as ever more of us have our DNA sequenced.

Saffo, Mary Beth. Accidental Elegance. American Scholar. 74/3, 2005. A biologist reviews current evolutionary theories for this Phi Beta Kappa journal and in so doing provides a capsule of our intellectual quandary. An editorial for the issue says that while humanists ought to criticize rational science, since the pursuit of reason itself is now under such attack from fundamentalists, we need to come to its defense. But Saffo commends the prevailing paradigm that human beings are of no special account or purpose. Life evolves by contingent chance, only by presumptive hubris do we see ourselves as its goal. Some “design” and convergence does occur, but overall no inherent direction or destiny exists. An aim of this website is to try to join the bicameral humanities and science, the two cultures, within a newly emergent knowledge of humankind.

Sasselov, Dimitar. The Life of Super-Earths: How the Hunt for Alien Worlds and Artificial Cells Will Revolutionize Life on Our Planet. New York: Basic Books, 2012. The Harvard University astronomer and leading mentor of exoplanetary science writes a post-Kepler survey of this 21st century Copernican (search Sasselov for more) revolution that is revealing a bountiful spacescape which innately seeds itself with a prolificacy of ovular worlds. “A super-Earth is a planet that is more massive and larger than Earth (a few times), although still made of rocks – perhaps with continents and oceans – and an atmosphere.” But the central message is an appreciation that “Life is a Planetary Phenomenon,” (a course Sasselov teaches with Andrew Knoll at Harvard) whence fertile bioworlds as our own embody a cellular locus of vital being and cognitive becoming in a uterine universe. The breakthrough advances of biological science can thus newly empower us, if we humans can come to our senses and organically unite in time, to begin a new genesis creation.

In the past year, we have witnessed unprecedented breakthroughs in the seemingly unrelated fields of synthetic biology and exoplanetary astronomy. Just recently, arsenic-based bacteria was discovered in a California lake—both puzzling and electrifying the scientific world. In The Life of Super-Earths, expert astronomer Dimitar Sasselov aims to highlight these groundbreaking findings and explain how what we learn in the laboratory informs our investigation of the universe, and vice versa. The Life of Super-Earths offers nothing short of a revolution in our understanding of life and its place in the cosmos. (Publisher)

Scharf, Caleb. A Universe Full of Planets. New York Times. July 26, 2013. An Op Ed piece by the Columbia University astrophysicist and author waxing over the “scientific revolution” that now finds a cosmos filled with as many orbiting worlds as stellar stars. But following on his recent writings, this epic discovery languishes in a roiling, indifferent cosmos and becomes further confirmation of how lost in senseless space are Earth and people. Everything is seen as contingent and chancy, the term “machinery” used for biomolecules and organisms, and so on. See also “Goodbye Copernicus, Hello Universe: So What?” in the online journal Nautilus (www.nautilus.us/issue1). His forthcoming book is The Copernicus Complex: A Quest for Our Cosmic (In) Significance (Penguin, April 2014). Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) is cited to represent, from his century, the prevalent belief that human beings have a special, ordained importance within a spatial and temporal numinous creation. The mechanical, male science and humanities seem on a mission to obscure, deny and ridicule this intuition ever since. Sadly, this latest finding of myriad worlds is then taken as the final nail and rejection.

Yet they (planets) are a critical piece of a great puzzle. In many ways they represent the final order of unfinished business for the Copernican worldview. We’ve never been able to completely convince ourselves that we’re nothing special, not central to the cosmos, because our solar system has been the only planetary collective known. Planets are tiny crumbs of matter — leftovers from epochs where gravity collapses and compresses vast interstellar nebulae into new stars. They’re fossil detritus, matter that gathers like droplets on a cooling windowpane, surviving as dust and gas around them evaporates and dissipates.

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