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

B. Anthropocene Sapiensphere: A Major Emergent Transitional Phase

wheeler, Wendy. Gregory Bateson and Biosemiotics: Transcendence and Animism in the 21st Century. www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Biosemiotics. A chapter in this online site Biosemiotics: Nature/Culture/Science/Semiosis, edited by Wheeler, a Reader in English at London Metropolitan University, who is an astute advocate of this vital revolution from moribund machine to a living, loquacious procreation. In essence, with sage biologist Bateson (1904-1980), recursive affinities between emergent creaturely evolution and human individual and collective cultural development can reveal deeply ingrained confluences between human and universe.

Borrowing from Carl Gustav Jung’s distinction between pleroma (non-living matter and its qualities) and creatura (living things and their qualities), Bateson believed that the problem with modern science (and western modernity generally) was it had developed an undue emphasis on pleroma without ever having developed an adequate grammar of creatura. More specifically, it treated living things as though they could only be understood in the language of mathematical description successfully applied to pleroma. The legacy of Cartesian dualism and Newtonian mechanics, over and against an understanding that all living systems are complex and nested organic wholes, has encouraged western societies to evolve in some deeply pathological directions. The idea that living beings are machines, in which reduction to physics will provide satisfactory explanations of their workings, is already under considerable strain. In a generation the idea will no doubt have become merely a quaint piece of historical scientific nonsense, like the theory of phlogiston. (37-38)

In other words, what is at stake in this recognition of evolutionary and individual ‘learning’ and growth is the central idea of growth of form which was once captured in religious ideas of both cultural and individual spiritual development. The idea that a life has a form, and thus a self-generated telos which can be intuited, animal-like, in the night-time of incalculable semiotic receptivity, is precisely what has largely been lost to moderns: hence our impoverished modern, instrumentalist, understanding of education merely as the expansion of ‘job opportunities’, and our hapless accounts of a successful life in terms of the accumulation of ‘goods’ reduced to material goods alone. (51)

Whitfield, John. In the Beat of a Heart: Life, Energy, and the Unity of Nature. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2006. Beginning with the Scottish polymath D’Arcy Thompson, a science writer surveys a later 20th century convergence of physics and biology to reveal structural and dynamic regularities throughout the biosphere. Its centerpiece is the work of Geoffrey West, James Brown, and Brian Enquist, a physicist and two ecologists, who have quantified a self-similar metabolism in organisms over orders of magnitude from microbes to whales. By this view, nested ecosystems can also be seen to take on metabolic properties. What accrues, one might add, is the realization that such universal principles can imply a greater viable creation springing from and graced such mathematical regularities, which makes all the difference.

An essay review of this book can be found in Current Biology (17/14, 2007) by Florian Maderspacher entitled "GUTs in Biology?" which wonders if these invariant similarities in flora and fauna can at last achieve the essence of a "grand unified theory" for biological realms.

As a result of their efforts, we are starting to understand how large groups of simple units can interact to produce complex behavior. One of the fruits of this new science has been an understanding of the links between power laws and fractal geometry. Power laws run through biology – in metabolism and other allometries, and in patterns of species diversity, rarity, and commonness. ….power laws show how the same principles can apply across scales from mitocondria to sequoias. Scientists have only just begun to exploit fractal geometry and power laws as ways of describing and unifying nature. (243)

Wilber, Ken. A Theory of Everything. Boston: Shambhala, 2000. This is the most cogent statement of Wilber’s worldview, which is not based on a bottom-level physics but graced by a universal pattern, an “Integral Psychology,” present everywhere. Four quadrants of internal and external self and society are seen to track the sequential ascent of spiritual consciousness. As a synthesis of many traditional and current contributions, the working model goes on to cite dynamic parallels between personal and national behaviors.

Wilson, David Sloan. This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution. New York: Pantheon, 2019. In his latest work, the SUNY Binghamton University biological anthropologist seeks a 21st century fulfillment of what Charles Darwin began by extending and applying life’s evolutionary development to the societies and cultures of homo sapiens. A Prologue advises that the endeavor also embodies Pierre Teilhard’s vision of a phenomenal cognitive noosphere. In regard, the author is a rarest professor trying to move scholarship beyond academe so to avail a better way to live on Earth. D. S. Wilson has long been an advocate of group selection (see also E. O. Wilson) whence animal communities can take on organism-like features. While aware of old Social Darwinisms, the tendency of all manner of creatures to form viably assemblies, if properly understood, could provide guiding principles for an equitable human “superorganic” phase. A practical solution, which we desperately need, is proposed as sustainable ecovillages. A case example is Dancing Rabbit in Missouri with many reciprocal member-community benefits. (Teilhard’s phrase was Creative Union whence a person becomes liberated within a supportive group).

It is widely understood that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution completely revolutionized the study of biology. Yet, according to David Sloan Wilson, the Darwinian revolution won’t be truly complete until it is applied more broadly—to everything associated with the words “human,” “culture,” and “policy.” In a series of engaging and insightful examples—from the breeding of hens to the timing of cataract surgeries to the organization of an automobile plant—Wilson shows how an evolutionary worldview provides a practical tool kit for understanding not only genetic evolution but also the fast-paced changes that are having an impact on our world and ourselves. What emerges is an incredibly empowering argument: If we can become wise managers of evolutionary processes, we can solve the problems of our age at all scales—from the efficacy of our groups to our well-being as individuals to our stewardship of the planet Earth.

Wilson, Edward O. Consilience. New York: Knopf, 1998. The Harvard biologist argues for a reunification of knowledge to complete the Enlightenment agenda. But the way he suggests is by a materialist reduction to physics and chemistry, which leads to a cosmology where humans are insignificant interlopers.

…an organism is a machine.…the universe was not made with us in mind. (43) The central idea of the consilience world view is that all tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequence, to the laws of physics. (266)

Wilson, Edward O.. Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies. New York: Liveright Norton, 2018. The newly nonagenarian (June 10) Harvard behavioral biologist and prolific author provides a latest view upon life’s proclivity to form viable groupings from invertebrates to homo sapiens. I heard him speak in Cambridge in 1975 about his then contentious work Sociobiology. E. O. Wilson has long been an advocate of such group selection whence each stage may take on the guise of a whole subject organism, and has coauthored papers with David Sloan Wilson, another proponent. Some 44 years later, the presence of multi-level social assemblies from bacterial and insect colonies to aquatic pods and avian starling flocks is well evident. Their occasion is set within a “major transitions in evolution” model due to John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary (section VI. H. 8) as members (genes, cells, humans) join into communal forms. Within this nested scale, a new emphasis is placed on salutary cooperative altruism rather than competitive, selfish individuals.

But the contribution can also illustrate a deep conceptual quandary that besets current science and philosophy. Up front E. O. Wilson states that while evolution is a proven fact, the sole motive agency is environmental post-selection of random gene mutations. All life, including human beings, can thus be reduced to chemistry and physics, as his 1998 Consilience contends. The result is a strong materialist view which denies any inherent creativity or purpose, especially divine influence, akin to Steven Pinker, Yuval Harari, Richard Dawkins and others. Yet do they realize that denunciations of an extant natural genesis only drives peoples back to “delusional” religious beliefs. With climate change, nuclear arsenals and barbaric warlords all the rage, it is so imperative, as this site tries to report and document, that a revolutionary, palliative resolve is soon achieved.

As a twenty-first-century statement on Darwinian evolution, Genesis shows that the only way for us to fully understand human behavior is to study the evolutionary histories of nonhuman species. Of these, Wilson demonstrates that at least seventeen―among them the African naked mole rat and the sponge-dwelling shrimp―have been found to have advanced societies based on altruism and cooperation. Whether writing about midges who “dance about like acrobats” or schools of anchovies who huddle “to appear like a gigantic fish,” Genesis is an insightful advance which braids scientific theory with biological and humanistic observations. (Publisher edits)

Among the millions of species around us are survivors, evolutionary products that one way or another reveal the six major steps of evolution leading from single-celled bacteria and other single organisms to humanity’s advanced capacity for language, empathy, and cooperation. (37) In each major transition in evolution, altruism at a lower level of biological organization is needed to reach the one above, as in cell to organism and organism to society. The dilemma, which at first seems paradoxical is in fact susceptible to explanation by evolution through natural selection. (47)

Woolfson, Adrian. Life Without Genes. London: HarperCollins, 2000. Written a few years ago by the British geneticist and physician, the work offers a unique expansive vista of a cosmic ‘informational sea’ of self-organizing dynamics from which life and human arise. The realm of DNA programs is but one substrate of animated matter as it forms a hierarchical sequence of complexity and encephalization. A significant step is to attribute genetic qualities to such innate non-equilibrium, autopoietic, networking propensities. As universal evolution so proceeds, an initial ‘analog’ phase due to nonlinear phenomena is taken over by the ‘digital’ activities of the molecular genomes. Although Woolfson does not focus on, this creative drive can be seen to ascend with the nested stages as they become increasingly cerebral and intelligent, lately breaking through into human reflection. As a result, a further analog mode may be dawning as intentional, respectful human modification may continue and enhance a new creation.

One might also observe, in order to pass muster in postmodern culture, the author finds it necessary on the second page to say of course the universe is vicariously pointless and indifferent, but then go on for some 400 pages to present a 21st century apparent cosmic to human genesis. An extraordinary work that merits several quotations.

One essential difference between complex systems that we call living and those that we do not is found not in the nature of the components from which the system is constructed, but rather in the way that they are organized. One of the things which distinguishes potentially living things from non-living things, is thus, their logical form. The pattern of organization that appears to be a prerequisite for life is known as a network structure. (210) In what follows, I will suggest that analog, geneless life might have arisen naturally and spontaneously as a consequence of the complex sets of interactions and dynamics arising within self-organizing, highly interconnected and tunable chemical networks. (211)

It is possible that the hypothetical transition from geneless life to life which harnessed the informational capacities of both self-assembling and self-organizing chemical networks and digital sequences, was precipitated by a genetic plague resulting from an unprecedented increase in the local concentrations of digital self-replicating or non-self-replicating molecules. (213) Rather than requiring an extraordinary miracle of chance to get it started, life may in fact be an expected, inevitable and inexorable property of matter located within the context of certain types of open and far-from-equilibrium systems. (252)

This model of genes as agents that modify the manner in which the mathematical patterns of complex self-organizing systems unfold in time and space appears generally reasonable. It assumes, however, that complex systems are not able to introduce bias into the decisions made at bifurcation points without the intervention of genes. Genes are envisaged as acting opportunistically on the unstructured mathematical edifices of otherwise free-running self-organizing systems. (263)

Although to date all life on Earth has been designed and assembled by the indifferent process of evolution by natural selection coupled with historical contingency and the physical and chemical laws which underlie self-assembly and self-organizational processes, eventually mankind will be in a position to loosen the shackles of the past and to attain a degree of liberation from the chance perambulations and constraints of history. (xiv)

Wright, Robert. Nonzero. New York: Pantheon, 2000. An innovative study which finds an inherent penchant and vectorial trend for beneficial cooperation in biological evolution and social history, if we would just look for it. Noted further in the Organic Societies and The Phenomenon of Humankind sections.

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