II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Twintelligent Gaiable Knowledge

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

Calude, Cristian and Giuseppe Longo. The Deluge of Spurious Correlations in Big Data. Foundations of Science. Online March, 2016. Senior philosophers of science explain how this much touted new method and paradigm based on analyses of massive amounts of computational bits is misplaced and erroneous. Rather than revealing hidden patterns, the more data that is being processed, the more spurious and fragmentary any such correlations will become.

Cao, Longbing. Data Science: A Comprehensive Overview. ACM Computing Surveys. 50/3, 2017. The University of Technology Sydney computer and intelligence scientist is also editor of International Journal of Data Science and Analytics (Springer, see below). While a bit breezy, it is can be a working entry with regard to how the profusion of giga bytes from astronomy to social media and commerce, if properly perceived and treated, can be of much beneficial service.

The 21st century has ushered in the age of big data and data economy, in which data DNA, which carries important knowledge, insights, and potential, has become an intrinsic constituent of all data-based organisms. An appropriate understanding of data DNA and its organisms relies on the new field of data science and its keystone, analytics. This article provides a comprehensive survey and tutorial of the fundamental aspects of data science: the evolution from data analysis to data science, the data science concepts, a big picture of the era of data science, the major challenges and directions in data innovation, the nature of data analytics, new industrialization and service opportunities in the data economy, the profession and competency of data education, and the future of data science. (Abstract)

Data-driven scientific discovery is a key emerging paradigm driving research innovation and industrial development in domains such as business, social science, the Internet of Things, and cloud computing. The field encompasses the larger areas of data analytics, machine learning, and managing big data, while related new scientific chal¬lenges range from data capture, creation, storage, search, sharing, analysis, and visualization, to integration across heterogeneous, interdependent complex resources for real-time decision-making, collaboration, and value creation. (International Journal of Data Science and Analytics)

Capra, Fritjof. The Science of Leanardo. New York: Doubleday, 2007. The Austrian-American physicist and environmentalist has spent the last three decades since the publication of his classic The Tao of Physics advocating a revolution in our thinking about cosmos and earth from mechanistic to organically systemic and dynamic in nature. Long a student of Da Vinci’s vision, Capra here insightfully recounts his life and work by which to situate him, a century (1452 – 1519) before Galileo, as a prime precursor of this later Romantic school. For the universe is not a material machine, but a viable organism of recurrent, analogous macrocosm and microcosm. Rather than particulate matter in random motion, one ought to observe via a holistic science the presence of common ecological patterns that grace a living bioplanet.

Carroll, Joseph, et al, eds. Darwin’s Bridge: Uniting the Humanities and Sciences. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. The chapters of this unique collection began as a 2012 conference Consilience: Evolution in Biology, the Human Sciences, and the Humanities at the University of Missouri. It drew from Edward O. Wilson’s 1998 work Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge both for its utility into the 21st century, and how such a synthesis might help join these two cultural domains. An authoritative array spoke from their expertise on primate, hominid, psychological, and social aspects. An especial theme was how evolutionary influences might show up in literary works. Christopher Boehm, Herbert Gintis, Ellen Dissanyake, Dan McAdams, Catherine Salmon, and Jonathan Gottschal, are among the contributors.

A final chapter by Massimo Pigliucci, however, found Wilson’s method of reduction to chemistry and physics inadequate and inappropriate. He went on to note that current denunciations of philosophy by Steven Weinberg, Stephen Hawking, and others are a further impediment to any valid natural unification, as obviously must be there. A Foreword by the medical historian, social activist and author Alice Dreger offers a similar qualm that science seems concerned only with what exists or happened, while questions about why they are so remain unanswered.

Casadevall, Arturo and Ferric Fang. Revolutionary Science. mBio. 7/2, 2016. In this American Society for Microbiology journal, a Johns Hopkins immunologist and a University of Washington microbiologist post their latest exploratory essay about the many facets of this most human endeavor. Its references will guide to prior essays from 2007 on descriptive, mechanistic, important, competitive, historical, and field aspects.

Chaio, Raymond, et al, eds. Visions of Discovery: New Light on Physics, Cosmology, and Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. A large edition that stems from a 2005 Templeton conference in honor of the 90th birthday of Charles Townes, discover of the laser. Some 37 men (e.g. Freeman Dyson, George Ellis, Paul Davies, Max Tegmark) and 2 women (Nancy Cartwright and Nancey Murphy) profess on these areas: The History and Future of Physical Science and Technology, Fundamental Physics and Quantum Mechanics, Astrophysics and Astronomy, New Approaches in Technology and Science, Consciousness and Free Will, and Reflections on the Big Questions: Mind, Matter, Mathematics, and Ultimate Reality. But as such titles convey, while trying to glimpse a modicum of presence and meaning, the endeavor remains caught, mostly unawares, in a Ptolemiac peering down in matter, back in time, and out in space, while losing any true organic vitality on the way.

Chang, Hasok. Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Taking how thermal properties came to be quantified as an example, an historian of science proposes a novel “complementary science” which would combine both analytical and narrative approaches.

Chang, Kevin. Alchemy as Studies of Life and Matter: Reconsidering the Place of Vitalism in Early Modern Chymistry. ISIS. 102/2, 2011. In a section on Alchemy and the History of Science about new admirations for this often maligned precursor to modern chemistry, an Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, historian makes the point that these early, rudimentary delvings into materiality took place within a prevailing, medieval sense of an organic, animate natural world. Such a “metaphysical Hermeticism,” broadly conceived, sought an intrinsic “seed, soul, or spiritus” that spans Creator and creatures. But this “vitalist cosmos” was later set aside as a mechanical model took over to this day. In our late 21st century how might a grand closure be availed by a worldwide discovery of a truly living cosmic gestation?

Would recognition of alchemists' interest in medicine make alchemy a less worthy subject within the history of science? Today we are witnessing an inverse form of vitalism. Medicine again is chemistry, although science no longer assumes any spiritual causes and steers well clear of the soul. In the Renaissance the vital principle, as the first principle of all things, united chemistry and medicine. Today it is the material compound that governs both sciences. Many would see this as the outcome of the materialization of nature by mechanists since the Scientific Revolution. Yet an idea held dear by Renaissance vitalists—that life unfolds according to a plan implanted in the inner seed of the fundamental unit of organic matter—is no longer myth, but confirmed science. Scientists have, in their own structures of explanation, found the semina that alchemists sought—the DNA or genomes that dwell at the kernel of the organic material (i.e., the cellular nucleus). In so doing they continue the early modern alchemists' urge to identify, extract, and manipulate the principles of life. (329)

Chavalarias, David and Jean-Philippe Cointet. Phylomemetic Patterns in Science Evolution. PLoS One. 8/2, 2013. As the Abstract describes, Complex Systems Institute of Paris researchers view the course of scientific studies as if a descriptive genetic phenomenon, which can be analyzed by similar methods.

We introduce an automated method for the bottom-up reconstruction of the cognitive evolution of science, based on big-data issued from digital libraries, and modeled as lineage relationships between scientific fields. We refer to these dynamic structures as phylomemetic networks or phylomemies, by analogy with biological evolution; and we show that they exhibit strong regularities, with clearly identifiable phylomemetic patterns. Some structural properties of the scientific fields - in particular their density -, which are defined independently of the phylomemy reconstruction, are clearly correlated with their status and their fate in the phylomemy (like their age or their short term survival). Within the framework of a quantitative epistemology, this approach raises the question of predictibility for science evolution, and sketches a prototypical life cycle of the scientific fields: an increase of their cohesion after their emergence, the renewal of their conceptual background through branching or merging events, before decaying when their density is getting too low. (Abstract)

Connor, Thomas, et al. Enhanced X-ray Emission for the Most Radio-Powerful Quasar in the Universe’s First Billion Years. arXiv:2103.03879. We cite this entry by eleven astronomers based in the USA, Germany, the UK, Italy, and Chile as one example among many of active worldwise studies about every aspect from quantum to, in this case, quasar phenomena. How could it be so that we tiny human beings who can yet now communicate in a super-organic way are able to gain such infinite knowledge. On the face of it, our global sapience seems as the phenomenal way that a self-creative universe can necessarily achieve a written, quantified description of itself.

We present deep Chandra X-ray observations of a quasar that, with a radio-to-optical flux ratio of R>1000, is one of the radio-loudest quasars in the early universe. Modeling the X-ray spectrum of the quasar with a power law, we identify a diffuse structure 50 kpc to the NW of the quasar along the jet axis that corresponds to a 3σ enhancement in the angular density of emission. (Abstract excerpt)

A quasar is an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus, in which a supermassive black hole with mass ranging from millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun is surrounded by a gaseous accretion disk.

Costanza, Robert. A Vision of the Future: Reintegrating the Study of Humans and the Rest of Nature. Futures. 35/651, 2003. A founder of the field of ecological economics proposes an alternative, integral path to a consilience of knowledge from that of Edward O. Wilson which reduces everything to chemistry and physics. In Costanza’s approach, the emergent fractal scale of nature that springs from self-organizing complex systems would marry analysis and synthesis so as to find similarities everywhere. By these lights, a shared, realistic vision of a sustainable future results.

Crosby, Alfred. The Measure of Reality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. A study of the European penchant to quantify the natural world. This endeavor to parcellate, dimension, count, number, and arrange propelled the West to technologically surpass China, the Middle East and the Americas.

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