(logo) Natural Genesis (logo text)
A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
Table of Contents
Introduction
Genesis Vision
Learning Planet
Organic Universe
Earth Life Emerge
Genesis Future
Glossary
Recent Additions
Search
Submit

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

A. Historic Prescience: Individual Homo Sapiens

Berry, Thomas. The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988. Sage essays contemplate the epic proportions and responsibilities of the human presence in an immense, still unfolding numinous universe. Typical chapter titles are: The Earth Community, The Ecological Age, Bioregions: The Context for Reinhabiting the Earth, The Historical Role of the American Indian and The Cosmology of Peace.

Such a fantastic universe, with its great spiraling galaxies, its supernovas, our solar system, and this privileged planed Earth! All this is held together in the vast curvature of space, poised so precisely in holding all things together in the one embrace and yet so lightly that the creative expansion of the universe might continue on into the future. (xv)

Boodin, John. Cosmic Evolution. New York: Macmillan, 1925. In a good example of this persuasion from the early 20th century, a philosopher outlines a “cosmic idealism” to express the progressive rise of life, mind and spirit. This optimism is contrasted with a sterile materialism then taking over, of which Bertrand Russell was a prime advocate. Some 80 years later the moribund model still reigns, but the project that Boodin and others pursued may at last come to fruition, with enough pieces in place, within its humankind vista.

The time has come for a synthesis of the scattered elements of the new story of creation into an imaginative whole. The data have accumulated with tremendous rapidity in the last generation. (7) It is a horrible tragedy that man should have accepted the theory of blind chance and of might as the philosophy of the universe. (459)

Boulding, Kenneth. Ecodynamics. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications,, 1978. A pioneer systems thinker provides a general theory of physical, biological and societal evolution which then sheds new light on the course of history. If asked “what evolves,” Boulding replies it is most of all an encoded “know-how.”

Boyle, Deborah. The Well-Ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Into the 21st century, scholarly studies have brought to light this mid-17th century feminine natural philosopher who was a peer of and complement to Isaac Newton. A similar 2010 volume in this section by Lisa Sarasohn began the late appreciation. Here a College of Charleston philosopher embellishes her unique blend of sensory mysticism and early science. As distinct from mechanical models (attributed to Newton, who was more an alchemist) she professed a natural “teleological wisdom,” by turns a “vitalist materialism,” with an intent to maintain an orderly world and cosmos. In that long ago age, an abiding, numinous creation was a given, deeply held conviction, as much as our day denies and disallows any phenomenal presence on its own.

The prolific Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) published books on natural philosophy as well as stories, plays, poems, orations, allegories, and letters. Her mature philosophical system offered a unique panpsychist theory of Nature as composed of a continuous, non-atomistic, perceiving, knowing matter. In contrast to the dominant philosophical thinking (Isaac Newton) of her day, Cavendish argued that all matter has free will and can choose whether or not to follow Nature's rules. Deborah Boyle argues that her natural philosophy, her medical theories, and her social and political philosophy are all informed by an underlying concern with order, regularity, and rule-following.

Buvet, Rene and Cyril Ponnamperuma, eds. Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life. Amsterdam: North Holland, 1971. These proceedings of an international conference held at the University of Paris with both American and Russian presenters, is a good capsule of this quest some half century ago. From General and Theoretical Problems to Oligomers and Polymers, Photochemistry, Biological Structures to Exobiology and more, an initial, rudimentary scope was established. We note an opening address by the eminent pioneer Alexander Oparin who professes an innately fertile natural cosmos, see quote. Some other speakers, early in their stellar careers, were Harold Morowitz, Howard Pattee, Ilya Prigogine, Carl Sagan, Sidney Fox, Lynn Margulis and Stanley Miller. But circa 2019, as we review again, the western mindset now concludes and rules out any innate, vivifying source or orthogenesis.

It has now become quite clear that the origin of life was not the result of some “happy chance” as was thought till quite recently, but a necessary stage in the evolution of matter. The origin of life is an inalienable part of the general process of development of the Universe and, in particular, the development of our earth. Hence, the phenomenon is accessible to science. (3)

Canales, Jimena. The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. The Mexican-American historian of science author has a Harvard doctorate and is now at the University of Illinois, Urbana. The extensively researched volume, a scholarly book of the year, draws a sharp contrast between Albert and Henri as representatives of classic mechanist or organic persuasions. Akin to Jessica Riskin’s study (2016 herein), the historic options are personified by these iconic European figures in the early 20th century. Bergson is aligned with Alfred North Whitehead and others, while Einstein stands for the inorganic cast going back to Newton. And the question and dichotomy still persists a century later, as this website seeks to report a resolution via our worldwise Earthkinder in favor of an animate universe to human procreation.


Bergson, in contrast, claimed that there was more to Time that scientists had ever wagered – and he meant scientists of all stripes, ranging from Darwinian evolutionists to astronomers and physicists. He associated it with elan vital, a concept translated worldwide as “vital impulse.” This impulse, he argued, was interwoven throughout the universe giving life an unstoppable surge, ever productive of unexpected creations, and imperfectly grasped by science. (7) Einstein’s and Bergson’s contributions appeared to their contemporaries forcefully at odds, representing two competing strands of modern times. Vitalism was contrasted against mechanization, creation against ratiocination, and personality against uniformity. Bergson was associated with metaphysics, antirationalism, and the idea that life permeates everything. Einstein with their opposites, with physics, rationality, and the idea that the universe (and our knowledge of it) could stand just as well without us. (7)

Capanna, Ernesto. Theoria Generationis: The Ancient Roots of Modern Developmental Biology. Rendiconti Lincei. 29/1, 2018. The journal is a current publication by the Italian science institution Academia dei Linci, founded in 1603. From our 21st century vantage and vista, a Sapienzia University of Rome biohistorian can review the millennial course of incipient imaginations (by men about something of which we know nothing) of how embryonic life came to form and grow, as the Abstract cites. The mid and later 20th century genetics and molecular biology, along with the evo-devo reunion, at last establishes our human understandings as scientific knowledge.

The debate between to be and to become that opposed Parmenides and Heraclitus became converted, over the subsequent two millennia, into the dilemmas between preformation and epigenesis, and immanence and transcendence. Aristotle, enunciating his Theoria generationis, moved the controversy from of Metaphysics to Physics, which can be glimpsed as extending into Biology in (William) Harvey’s De Motu Cordis and Exercitatione de Generatione Animalium with the concept of ovism. In the same period, the spermatozoon (animalculum) was described, which became a counterpart with ovism. These theories thus formed a background of preformation or epigenesis. In the Enlightenment, the dispute over development was exposed to Cartesian rationalism and experimentation. (Auguste) Comte’s positivism led to material first causes, according to the laws of Physics and Chemistry. (Wilhelm) Roux’s Entwicklungsmechanick defined developmental biology from the later nineteenth century until the 1950s when Crick and Watson finally resolving the millenary conflict between preformation and epigenesis in molecular and genetics terms. (Abstract edits)

Capra, Fritjof. The Turning Point. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. A holistic systems view of life is proposed to supplant the mechanical model and as a consequence to inform for a more humane society. Capra provides a prescient grasp of complex adaptive system theory:

Besides the complementarity of self-assertive and integrative tendencies, which can be observed at all levels of nature’s stratified systems, living organisms display another pair of complementary dynamic phenomena that are essential aspects of self-organization. One of them, which may be described loosely as self-maintenance, includes the processes of self-renewal, healing, homeostasis, and adaption. The other, which seems to represent an opposing but complementary tendency, is that of self-transformation and self-transcendence, a phenomenon that express itself in the processes of learning, development, and evolution.(285)

Cartwright, Julyan, et al. Dynamical Systems, Celestial Mechanics, and Music: Pythagoras Revisited.. arXiv:2104.00998. Into these 2020s, University of Granada and University of Bologna metascholars cast a long retrospective survey back to Greece, to renaissance Italy so as by turns to perceive a deep affinity with the new sciences of self-organizing complexity. By this consummate vista, via a whole mind to allow and perceive, our phenomenal Earthuman sapience can at last discern, decipher and discover an innately present, totally recurrent, universal pattern and process. See also a James Hartle 2019 paper about Murray Gell Mann for a smilar vista. We altogether ought to appreciate in our moment of global closure what an epic musica and mathesis appreciation this is. There really is a score and script of the sapienspheres, a uniVerse to wumanVerse if we could allow, listen to and literally read might provide the dispensary guidance we so need.

Gioseffo Zarlino reintroduced the Pythagorean paradigm into Renaissance musical theory. In a similar fashion, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton reinvigorated Pythagorean ideas in celestial mechanics; Kepler and Newton explicitly invoked musical principles. Today, the theory of dynamical systems allows us to describe very different applications of physics, from the orbits of asteroids in the Solar System to the pitch of complex sounds. Our aim in this text is to review the overarching aims of our research in this field over the past quarter of a century. We demonstrate with a combination of dynamical systems theory and music theory the thread running from Pythagoras to Zarlino that allowed the latter to construct musical scales using the ideas of proportion known to the former, and we discuss how the modern theory of dynamical systems, with the study of resonances in nonlinear systems, returns to Pythagorean ideas of a Musica Universalis. (Abstract)

Chaudhuri, Haridas and Frederic Spiegelberg, eds. The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo. London: Allen & Unwin, 1960. A collection from a 1957 conference at the San Francisco Ashram upon the visionary Indian sage (1872-1950) who sought to recast Hindu eternal cycles of return into an evolutionary ascent from original mind and matter to awakening beings, self-consciousness and a global spirituality. Its topics cover Philosophy, Epistemology, Psychology, Yoga, Ethics, and Literature with papers as Mind and Supermind by Satischandra Chatterjee, Integral Knowledge by Ninian Smart, Integralism: A Philosophie Perennis by Ruth Renya, and Integral Yoga by Pitirim Sorokin. In Sri Aurobindo and Spengler (Oswald 1880-1936), S. K. Maitra compares Western histories of drift and decline without a vitalizing force or teleological course with this Eastern synthesis of a feminine cosmic matrix for masculine material objects, a primal doubleness of life force and Divine destiny. From 2013 see Situating Sri Aurobindo: A Reader edited by Peter Heehs (Perennial Wisdome). Into the mid 2010s, along with Pierre Teilhard’s similar reorientation of Christianity, a numinous natural genesis may gain in veracity and recognition.

Collado-Vides, Julio, et al, eds. Integrative Approaches to Molecular Biology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. We enter this work as a precedent because in the mid 1990s the 21st century genetics revolution was just beginning to be scoped out. Notably in regard is a lead chapter by Richard Lewontin which avers a need to set aside the organisms as machines metaphor if any real progress is to be made. In his perceptive chapter On Genomes and Cosmologies, Antoine Danchin advises that the recognition of pervasive network phenomena will help better understandings of genomes, seen as similar to how stars lace and grace across the sky. The closing chapter The Language of the Genes by Robert Berwick recommends a cross-fertilization between these domains (but cites genetic machinery).

Damasio, Antonio, et al, eds. Unity of Knowledge: the Convergence of Natural and Human Science. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Vol. 935, 2001. We cite these conference papers some 17 years later to reflect upon the 21st century scientific transition. It was inspired in part by Edward O. Wilson’s 1998 work Consilience, he gave the opening address. Inklings and promise of a unification abided, but presenters mostly held to their own field. We note A. Damasio, Stuart Kauffman, and Terrence Deacon. However this has not since happened, natural philosophy has fallen into disarray, rife with denials of any phenomenal reality at all. While individuals seem to be overwhelmed, the guiding gist of this website is that research studies have shifted to a global sapiensphere which is now proceeding, as yet unbeknownst, to learn and discover on her/his own. See the article Science of Science by Santo Fortunato, et al in Science (March 2, 2018) for a latest affirmation.

Previous   1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9  Next