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

B. Anthropocene Sapiensphere: A Major Emergent Transitional Phase

Smil, Vaclav. Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019. The prolific University of Manitoba polygeographer continues to chronicle our civilizational condition by way of studies on energy, resources, food, industry, economies, environments, and onto global perils as an inveterate Earthkeeper, guardian of Gaia. This latest work roots their anthropic occasion, akin to big history, into life’s long emergent evolution from microcellular origins. By this scenario, circa 2019 the author goes on to identify a deeper, mathematic source of natural, self-organizing propensities. These effects are evident in their invariant, self-similar, sublinear and superlinear phases across animal, human and hyper-urban abidances. As all his volumes, the intent is to achieve a copious perspective to inform and sustain a better, sustainable bioplanet going forward.

Growth has been an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinary brains and economic fortunes. In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers a systematic investigation of growth in nature and society from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations. He examines the growth of energy conversions essential to civilization. He explains that we can chart the growth of organisms across individual and evolutionary time, but the progress of societies and economies encompasses both decline and renewal. (Publisher excerpt)

Invariant behavior of many physical phenomena and their power-law distributions have been explained by various optimization schemes, cooperative effects, preferential attachment, self-similarity and fractal geometry, organized criticality, and by nonlinear dynamics including multiplicative cascades. (68)

Smith, Eric and Harold Morowitz. The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Biosphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. The 675 page tome is a magisterial opus of the late (1927-March 22, 2016) Harold Morowitz’s sixty years at the frontiers of biological science, first at Yale University and later at George Mason University. He is joined and aided by Eric Smith, a theoretical physicist with postings at George Mason and the Santa Fe Institute who worked with HM and colleagues on this synthesis of organic metabolism and statistical mechanics. The result is a model of litho- (land), hydro- (sea), and atmo- (air) spheres from which biogeochemical, replicative, microbial evolutionary living systems arise. From basic physical realms, non-equilibrium thermodynamics and phase transitions serve to impel nested, invariantly emergent organisms in conducive environments.

As noted herein (search HM) I first heard Harold speak in New York City in 1972 on Biology as a Cosmological Imperative. He has stayed on message so that it can now be said that Jacques Monod’s 1970 Chance and Necessity which claims all is accident, is refuted by the presence of an inherent natural agency that organizes, ramifies, and directs. While a stochastic cosmos is admitted, a non-random biogenesis is seen to proceed due to innate, oriented energy and information flows. This grand project remains much in progress and has a way to go, of which this large book is a stock-taking and guide. We append a quote from a review by Sara Walker in Physics Today for September 2017.

Smith and Morowitz contend that by shifting the focus from individuals to ecosystems, they make explanations simpler, not harder. Universal properties of core metabolism exist at the level of ecosystems, whereas most individuals do not in general express those universalities. This means that the emergence of ecosystmes may be more amenable to study via hte tools of physics, many of which are structured to study statistical regularities, than is the emergence of individuals, who are highly contingent. (SW 58)

Smith, Howard. Questioning Copernican Mediocrity. American Scientist. July-August, 2017. The Harvard University astrophysicist and author (search Howard) first reviews the long demotion of human and Earth initiated by Nicolaus C. from a 15th century central position to an insignificance lost in a pointless evolutionary multiverse spacescape. The “Copernican principle” phrase denotes this removal, along with the absence of any privileged location. But if we might just now pay attention to the latest worldwide scientific findings, we may be in the midst of a 21st century revolutionary reprieve. An especial reason is the discovery of an apparent cosmic propensity to form myriad planetary objects in solar habitable zones. A Misanthropic Principle is cited which means that because of vicarious contingencies, intelligent worlds must be vanishingly rare. Yet the existence of a sentient, collaborative species as we peoples able to achieve such knowledge is so incredible, how could it all be an accident. For a plethora of reasons, if such a consideration can even be allowed, an aware, cognizant planet like Earth would no longer be a dust mote but of phenomenal import. The article is a "cosmosmark" cover story in this popular publication.

Smitsman, Anneloes and Jude Currivan. Systemic Transformation into the Birth Canal. Systems Research and Behavioral Science. Online January, 2019. Sensitive scholars (bios next) provide a woman’s appreciation of a parturient planet in the throes of giving birth. The vital necessity is thus an integral, worldwise shift from an old, mechanical, moribund scheme to such an organic embryogenesis, which is also the intent of this website. See also their latest books Love Letters from Mother Earth: The Promise of a New Beginning (Quatre Bornes, Mauritius: EARTHwise Publications, 2018) by Anneloes and The Cosmic Hologram: In-formation at the Center of Creation (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2017) by Jude.

Anneloes Smitsman is the founder and facilitator of the EARTHwise Centre (Google). She is an author, storyteller, and catalyst for transformational change, collective thrivability, and innovative education. Her wisdom-based training programs have empowered people and organisations to develop, and actualise their true potential by accessing our collective intelligence and wisdom. She is the author of the bestseller Love Letters from Mother Earth – The Promise of a New Beginning”. She has a Masters degree in Law & Political Science from Leiden University and finishing a Ph.D at Maastricht University.

Jude Currivan, Ph.D., is a cosmologist, futurist, planetary healer and previously one of the most senior business women in the UK. She has a master’s degree in physics from Oxford University and a doctorate in archaeology from the University of Reading in the UK. She has traveled extensively, worked with wisdom keepers from many traditions, and is a life-long researcher into the nature of reality. She is the author of 6 books, including The Cosmic Hologram, and is a member of the Evolutionary Leaders circle.

The first law of thermodynamics tells that the total amount of energy and matter in our Universe remains constant. This is also called the law of constants and implies that our Universe is a closed system with regard to matter and energy. The second law of thermodynamics was explained in terms of increasing entropy over time. This law, from an infodynamics perspective, can be regarded as increasing complexity of informational content over time. This opens an evolutionary view how our Universe evolved from initial simplicity through biocomplexity over time. This paper explores how to apply this understanding for systemic transformational change within conventional systems that have evolved from a mechanistic worldview. Examples of praxis are provided to highlight this midwifing process to ease our collective birthing pains into new ways of being. (Abstract)

Smolin, Lee. Darwinism All the Way Down. Brockman, John, ed. Intelligent Thought. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. The philosophical physicist contributes in this collection of scientific debunkings of “Intelligent Design” his latest, unique views of natural selection applied to a bubbly multitude of universes. Rather than our own cosmos being inexplicably conducive to life because amongst an infinity of options its parameters and laws came out just right, by virtue of a propensity for self-organization such “biofriendly” cases might “reproduce” themselves through increased numbers of black holes. Therefore a selective bias would occur which favors this outcome.

In the same volume, MIT “quantum mechanic” Seth Lloyd weighs in with his version of a “smart,” information-processing, self-computing, recursive universe which prefers increasingly complex and cognitive life-forms. Active intervention by a Deity is thus not necessary. But these nascent imaginations do suggest, if to allow the possibility, glimpses of a ordained creation, a greater genesis, with its own generative properties which involve human-like participation.

Stafford, Barbara. Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. This latest work by the distinguished University of Chicago art historian goes on to draw on advances in dynamical neuroscience, complex systems theory, and autopoietic symbiogenesis to illuminate deep affinities between our self-organizing cerebral networks and their artistic and sculptural representations. From Paleolithic and aboriginal cave paintings to William Blake, Romantic sensibilities, Dutch Masters, modern surrealism, to electronic biologic and genetic media today, a singular analogous theme can be discerned, ‘a common echoic code.’ Throughout history, human beings have tried to symbolically express this fantastic extant reality, which only now can be appreciated as a reflection of modular neural architecture and its resultant thought. By pressing such accords, which are backed up by extensive literature citations, the book proposes to counter Slavoj Zizek’s The Parallax View whose postmodern despair denies any such ingrained patterns that might marry human and universe. An insightful work for it is, as ever, by the perception of this ingrained secret similitude that an animate cosmic creation can be entered, known, and transfigured.

Staune, Jean, ed. Science and the Search for Meaning. Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2006. A wide-ranging survey within the Templeton orbit of the lineaments of knowledge itself, interstices between a scientific version and religious traditions, and whether the universe may be conducive to life and human or not. What distinguishes the collection are several cogent papers which could summarize the thought of their author. Thomas Odhiambo, first president of the African Academy of Sciences, describes in Essence and Continuity of Life in the African Society a conception of an organic milieu composed not only of extant beings, but suffused by an internal, ascendant life pulse. (notice phenotype and genotype in the quote) Similarly, Nobel laureate biochemist Christian de Duve implies in Mysteries of Life: Is There “Something Else” that the (Northern) materialist view misses such a vital agency to sanction, as de Duve avers, an innately life bearing cosmos.

In “Glimpsing the Mind of God,” cosmologist Paul Davies likewise agrees that by its physical and chemical nature, the universe will generate increasingly complex and conscious life. Finally, in “Dialogue of Civilizations: Making History through a New World Vision,” the California Institute of Technology professor and Nobel laureate chemist Ahmed Zewail, provides a luminous essay on the course of Islamic science and culture as a way to build bridges to an imperative synthesis of Qur’anic scripture and the global scientific community.

Likewise, the Akan people of Ghana consider a human being to be constituted of three elements: the okra, sunsum, and honam. The okra is the innermost self, or life force of the person expressed as a spark of the Supreme Being in the person as the child of God. It is also translated as the English equivalent of the “soul.” The sunsum seems to be equivalent to the spirit of humanity, and with close analysis is not essentially separate from the okra. The honam refers to the physical body. (70) The relationship between God and humankind is as that of a parent and child. (68) Thomas Odhiambo

The emergence of life and consciousness, I maintain, are written into the laws of the universe in a very basic way. (35) The origin of life and consciousness were not interventionist miracles but nor were they stupendously improbable accidents. They were, I believe, part of the natural outworking of the laws of nature and, as such, our existence as conscious enquiring beings springs ultimately from the bedrock of physical existence – those ingenious, felicitous laws. (35) Paul Davies

Susskind, Leonard. The Cosmic Landscape. New York: Little, Brown, 2005. The Stanford University physics professor and founding member of string theory, the holographic principle, black hole complementarity, etc, writes his book. This formidable work, sans equations, is accessible and a good entry to such arcane topics. Susskind avers that his specialty is elementary particles, with associated quantum phenomena, which is well explained, along with contributions from many collaborators. But it also could be seen as a running out of the 20th century reductionist paradigm to its furthest extreme. With a subtitle String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, the so-called Anthropic Principle (see section in Part III) whereby our universe evolves sentient, inquisitive beings because its fundamental parameters, such as the cosmological constant, are so finely tuned, is confronted and set aside. To do this, the current multiverse model (renamed megaverse) is employed which postulates that within an almost infinite number of “pocket” universes, our local cosmos is but a rare, statistically conducive bubble. The emergence vista of Robert Laughlin’s (A Different Universe) is mentioned but dismissed. So Bertrand Russell’s 1915 despair over fleeting human “brightness” in a dying universe is lately compounded by even more improbable occasion and indifference.

If this book were to be reduced to a single thought, it would be that the grand organizing principle of both biology and cosmology is: A landscape of possibilities populated by a megaverse of actualities. (346)

Swan, Liz, et al, eds. Origin(s) of Design in Nature: A Fresh, Interdisciplinary Look at How Design Emerges in Complex Systems, Especially Life. Dordrecht: Springer, 2012. Volume 23 in the Cellular Origin, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology series, founded by Joseph Seckbach, who is here a coeditor, along with Richard Gordon. At www.springer.com/series/5775 the entire series is accessible. The impressive table of contents, and chapter abstracts are available on its Springer site. Major sections include Origins of Design, Philosophical Aspects, Theological Aspects, Design beyond Darwinism, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences. While not “intelligent design,” an eclectic array of papers from astronomers, physicists, biologists to philosophers and theologians endeavor to find ways to admit and discern the presence of an intentionally ordained and somehow purposeful creation. For a sample: On the Biological Origin of Design in Nature by Attila Grandpierre, Structure and Creativeness: A Reinterpretation of the Neo-Binary Catory Li and Qi by Jana Rosker, Divine Genesis, Evolution, and Astrobiology by Joseph Seckbach, and Necessity and Freedom in Designs of Nature by Josef Svoboda.

Origin(s) of Design in Nature is a collection of over 40 articles from prominent researchers in the life, physical, and social sciences, medicine, and the philosophy of science that all address the philosophical and scientific question of how design emerged in the natural world. The volume offers a large variety of perspectives on the design debate including progressive accounts from artificial life, embryology, complexity, cosmology, theology and the philosophy of biology. (Publisher)

Swimme, Brian and Thomas Berry. The Universe Story. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1992. A unique collaboration of a mathematical cosmologist and a cultural historian which conveys an epic sense of a self-organizing creation from its singularity origin to a potentially humane, sustainable “Ecozoic” age. A goal of this website is to provide substantial evidence in support of this indispensable vision.

The important thing to appreciate is that the story as told here is not the story of a mechanistic, essentially meaningless universe but the story of a universe that has from the beginning had its mysterious self-organizing power that, if experienced in any serious manner, must evoke an even greater sense of awe than that evoked in earlier times at the experience of the dawn breaking over the horizon, the lightning storms crashing over the hills, or the night sounds of the tropical rainforests, for it is out of this story that all of these phenomena have emerged. (238)

Swimme, Brian Thomas and Mary Evelyn Tucker. Journey of the Universe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. . In 1991 Thomas Berry asked me to read through the MS for The Universe Story, coauthored with cosmologist Brian Swimme. This breakthrough edition has since inspired a rising visionary narrative of a sustainable human and earthly place and purpose in a genesis creation. Some two decades on Swimme, now at the California Institute of Integral Studies, joined by Mary Evelyn Tucker, historian of religion and senior scholar at Yale University, a long time colleague of Thomas Berry, and my valued friend, continue forth with this 21st century evocation. I have read this MS also, and contributed to its 30 page bibliography, with many works drawn from this site.

A multimedia website www.journeyoftheuniverse.org for the whole project presents the book, an hour long film with trailer, a schedule of nationwide showings, DVD educational materials, an art gallery, and many endorsements. As an example of its quality and import, the film was chosen by PBS to be shown in prime time for its December pledge drive. Additional information may also be found in the Spring and Fall 2011 issues of the Teilhard Perspective newsletter of the American Teilhard Association, which I edit. These are online at: http://teilharddechardin.org/index.php/teilhard-perspectives.

Today we know what no previous generation knew: the history of the universe and of the unfolding of life on Earth. Through the astonishing combined achievements of natural scientists worldwide, we now have a detailed account of how galaxies and stars, planets and living organisms, human beings and human consciousness came to be. And yet . . . we thirst for answers to questions that have haunted humanity from the very beginning. What is our place in the 14-billion-year history of the universe? What roles do we play in Earth's history? How do we connect with the intricate web of life on Earth?

In Journey of the Universe Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker tell the epic story of the universe from an inspired new perspective, weaving the findings of modern science together with enduring wisdom found in the humanistic traditions of the West, China, India, and indigenous peoples. The authors explore cosmic evolution as a profoundly wondrous process based on creativity, connection, and interdependence, and they envision an unprecedented opportunity for the world's people to address the daunting ecological and social challenges of our times. (Publisher)

Szathmary, Eors. Understanding of Man’s Place in the Universe. Steiner, George, convener. Is Science Nearing Its Limits?. Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2008. The Eotvos Lorand University (Budapest) biologist, a collaborator with the late John Maynard Smith, (search herein, also see Emergent Genetic Info) updates their perception of an evolutionary emergence via sequential stages from biomolecules to human language. From a new systems chemistry to linguistic dynamics, a repetitive pattern and process can now be discerned, which is a significant finding. The conference at which this paper was contributed, and the book collects, worried that human inquiry, especially in physics, was reaching the edges of space, time and matter. With reference to the Polish polymath Stanislaw Lem, Szathmary allows the path ahead is fraught, but our propensity to seek and gain knowledge is far from over.

If you look at the major transitions, there is a list of common recurrent elements that you can identify here, which happen sufficiently frequently at these transitions to merit discussion. Independently reproducing units come together and form a higher-level unit; for example, your cells, your eukaryotic cells, are harbouring mitochondria, which once upon a time were free-living bacteria. You have the division of labour or combination of functions, depending on how you get to the higher-level unit. (114)

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