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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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I. Our Planatural Edition: A 21st Century PhiloSophia, Earthropo Ecosmic PediaVersion

A. Historic Prescience: Individual Homo Sapiens

Miller, James B.. Cosmic Questions. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Vol. 950, 2001. An introduction to proceedings of a 1999 AAAS & Smithsonian Institute conference to consider the millennial universe vistas across the sciences and humanities. A premier panel includes Joel Primack, Nancy Abrams, Owen Gingerich, Jaroslav Pelikan, Alan Guth, Neil Turok, John Leslie, John Barrow, Stephen Weinberg, John Polkinghorne, Lawrence Kushner, and John Haught. We enter in mid 2017 as an instance whence not two decades ago many areas from a big bang to life’s origin and beyond were vague and rudimentary. An exoplanet propensity, infinite multiverse, ubiquitous networks, and much more were not yet known.

Miller, James G. Living Systems. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978. A landmark treatise on the nested, hierarchical organization of biological and social life wherein 20 critical subsystems which process either matter-energy or information repeat at several subsequent levels. These similar, isomorphic features “thread out” at each stage from the genetic to the global. The resultant field of Living Systems Theory has been elaborated in the journals Behavioral Science and its successor Systems Research and Behavioral Science.

Moore, Gerald and Marlan Scully, eds. Frontiers of Nonequilibrium Statistical Physics. Berlin: Springer, 2013. A paperback reprint of an original edition from a 1986 NATO Summer School in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico. We enter as a glimmer of the present revolution to encounter and articulate a spontaneously fertile materiality, albeit stochastic in detail but mathematically encoded to evolve and develop into an overall embryonic form.

The four-week period from May 20 to June 16, 1984 was an intensive period of advanced study on the foundations and frontiers of nonequili¬brium statistical physics (NSP). This book comprises proceedings based on those lectures and covering a broad spectrum of topics in NSP ranging from basic problems in quantum measurement theory to analogies between lasers and Darwinian evolution. The various types of quantum distribution functions and their uses are treated by several authors. other tools of NSP, such as Langevin equations, Fokker-Planck equations, and master equations, are developed and applied to areas such as laser physics, plasma physics, Brownian motion, and hydrodynamic instabilities. Information theory, mean-field theory, reservoir theory, entropy maximization, and even a novel nonlinear generalization of quantum mechanics are used to discuss nonequilibrium phenanena and the approach toward thermodynamic equilibrium.

Murchie, Guy. The Seven Mysteries of Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978. A grand tour of the realms of abstraction, relatedness, life, polarity, mind, and transcendence along with a perception of Earth as an embryonic superorganism. (Noted again in Planetary Self-Selection)

Sixth is the germination of worlds, a critical event that seems to happen once to every celestial organism and, after her billions of years of slow evolution, is occurring right now to Earth, as evidenced by many fundamental changes during what we call modern times - things that, as far as we know, never happened before and can never happen again on our planet. (7)

Neumann, Erich. The Origins and History of Consciousness. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Jungian insights into the whole of history as an analogous cycle of individuation understandable through archetypal mythic symbols. By this dimension, the great mission of humankind is seen as the heroic achievement of a whole person.

Nolte, David. Galileo Unbound: A Path Across Life, the Universe and Everything. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. A Purdue University physicist and astronomer complements his course text Introduction to Modern Dynamics: Chaos, Networks, Space and Time (2015) with a 400 year trajectory of the scientific method so well initiated by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) all the way from his moon to our multiverse.

Galileo Unbound traces the history of dynamics that brought us from Galileo's law of free fall to geneticists measuring evolutionary drift, entangled quantum particles moving among many worlds, and our lives as trajectories through a multidimensional phase space. Remarkably, common themes persist that predict the evolution of species as readily as the orbits of planets or the collapse of stars into black holes. This book tells the history of expanding dimensions and more complex systems since Galileo’s early 1600s.

Peat, F. David. Einstein’s Moon. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1990. The frontier physics of Bohr, Bohm and Bell attest to a connected, animate and creative universe.

A similar vision extends across the physical universe. It suggests that the universe is not a dead thing, composed separate parts in mechanical interaction; rather it is organic - an almost living thing in which each aspect subsists on some underlying activity. (157)

Phillips, Rob. Schrodinger’s What is Life? at 75. Cell Systems. June, 2021. The Caltech biophysicist (see his lab page for more) observes in retrospect how deftly prescient the Nobel physicist was as he advised the innate presence of a creative code-script quality. His 1943 theme was to initiate and inspire “physical science” to include this evident dimension and “underlying principle” in their compass and studies. By virtue of this expansion, a “unified, all-embracing knowledge” might be achieved. As Phillips alludes, two decades into the 21st century it may at last become possible to flesh out and fulfill this visionary promise.

The year 2019 marked the 75th anniversary of Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life?, a short book cited as one of the most influential scientific writings of the 20th century.” I review the long thesis made by the Nobel physicist as he mused on how the laws of physics could help us understand “the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism.” But instead of noting ways that the book touched leading biologists, as often done, I argue that Schrödinger’s classic could be appreciated a timeless manifesto. What Is Life? is in search of deep understandings about the living world that includes and surrounds us. In this wider regard, it can inspire and inform living matter studies well into the 21st century. (Abstract excerpt)

Popov, Igor. Orthogenesis versus Darwinism. International: Springer, 2018. A Russian zoologist at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Vienna achieves a comprehensive study of evolutionary views from the mid 19th century through the twentieth to the present time. Orthogenesis is a broad term for a “directed evolution” along a preordained path, rather than by aimless, random selection alone. The chapters run from an earlier, popular conception in Darwin’s day, on to its rejection and replacement by the modern 1950s synthesis. The work goes on to an advocacy of orthogenesis by many Russian and later Japanese biologists, along with Pierre Teilhard and others. The idealist concept remains in a minority position because it conveys a progressive orientation which is actually there.

This book reviews the convoluted history of orthogenesis with an emphasis of non-English sources, untangles relationships between various concepts of directed evolution and argues whether orthogenesis has something to offer modern biology. Darwinism claims that evolution occurs by selection from an extensive random variability. An alternative viewpoint―that the material for variability is limited and organisms are predisposed to in certain directions―is the essence of evolutionary concepts that can be grouped under the name of orthogenesis. Dating back to Lamarck, orthogenesis has existed in many guises. Branded as mystical and discarded as unscientific, it keeps re-emerging in evolutionary discussions. (Summary)

Richards, Robert. The Romantic Conception of Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. A definitive history of the 18th and 19th century Continental and British Naturphilosophie vision of an innately organic, fertile, and numinous cosmos. What is most noteworthy is a concluding chapter on “Darwin’s Romantic Biology,” a follow up to Richards’ The Meaning of Evolution (Chicago, 1992), which makes the provocative case that Darwin would not be a Darwinist. As immersed in this conceptual milieu of the day, The Origin of Species does not describe a mechanical nature without purpose, as his selection theory has become equated with, but a teleological self-organization.

Riskin, Jessica. The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. The Stanford University historian of science continues her exposition of the curious strained course of scientific models of nature’s machine or organic character. (At the outset, one may note an extensive index where the ratio of men to women is about 100 to 1, e.g. Ada Comstock, Eva Jablonka). In any event, a mechanist turn since Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle and company has sought to remove a vital spontaneity or innate self-motive, so as to rule out divine influences. But this absence begged referral to a supernatural designer whom set the worldly mechanism in motion. The centuries since are a retold story of advocates from Rene Descartes and Thomas Huxley to Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Minority views are cited from Gottfried Leibniz and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck to Norbert Weiner, Alan Turing onto Gerd Muller and Stuart Newman today, with a full complement for both persuasions.

But from our late vantage, the result has been a cobbled conflation of mechanical and organic features and terms, many papers herein cite a protein or metabolic machinery. Indeed, a current entry Active Matter at the Interface between Materials Science and Cell Biology by Daniel Needleman and Zvonimir Dogic (2017) opens with a quote from Riskin’s book but implies that this novel meld of physics and biology may approach a resolve and synthesis. A further issue, not addressed by Riskin, or hardly anyone, moves beyond whatever paradigm one prefers, to whether a greater (genesis) reality actually abides with its own drive, course and destiny. To wit is there nothing, the current view, or an intrinsic something of which all manner and especially aware human beings, are an exemplary, intended phenomenon?

The Restless Clock examines the origins and history of the principle banning agency from science and this principle’s accompanying clockwork model of nature, in particular as these apply to the science of living things. The Restless Clock also tells the story of a tradition of dissenters who embraced the opposite principle: that agency is an essential and ineradicable part of nature. (2) By “agency,” then I mean simply an intrinsic capacity to act in the world, to do things in a way that is neither predetermined nor random. Its opposite is passivity. (3)

This book has traced the history of a paradox at the heart of modern science, a paradox of particular significance for scientific accounts of life and mind. The paradox originated in the seventeenth century, with the emergence of modern science, in its mechanical clockwork model of nature. This model banished from nature all purpose, sentience, and agency, leaving behind a brute mechanical world that was fully intelligible without reference to mysterious forces or agencies. These chapters have also traced the parallel development of a competing form of science that naturalized rather than exported purpose and agency. This alternative, active-mechanist tradition, though overshadowed by the brute-mechanist one, developed in ongoing dialectic with it. (337)

Robledo, Alberto and Carlos Velarde. rA Half-Century Research Footpath in Statistical Physics. arXiv:2401.06181. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México physicists provide a unique retrospective of a combined sequence of achievements on a long winding walk toward a unified synthesis. The nonlinear dynamics section alone has a dozen sections which stand as a good review of the subject.

We give an account of condensed matter and complex system studies that span five decades by links to access abstracts and full texts of a select publications. The topics, techniques and outcomes reflect evolving interests of the community along with the use of analogies in distinctive ways. The studies have been grouped into thirty sets and these, in turn, placed into three collections according to the main approach: stochastic processes, density functional theory, and nonlinear dynamics. We refer to our main surmise: Athe validity of ordinary statistical mechanics and the pertinence of (Constantino) Tsallis statistics. (Excerpt)

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