New 'object oriented science' for living and working with natural whole systems
My essay this year in Cosmos & History’s collection of papers on “What Is Life” is importantly about noticing that animals are not primarily involved in conflict, as the Darwinian theory and the equations of ecology are described to mean. Life’s Hidden Resources for Learning When watching animals behave, fish in a stream or mice
my comments with Stan Salthe’s -snip- S: Overall, my point is that nature’s workings are mysterious, and we (think we) understand (just a small portion of) them by way of our discourses. [ph] Yes, and the portion we can codify in language and write in terms that are culturally meaningful to us and relevant to
Mary’s response (to my note below) —- Phil – You are so nice to set your ideas forth. This one really resonates with me: It’s that signal from nature of strain on the resource that we need to read differently. We’ve been reading it backwards, essentially. We’ve been seeing it as a signal of where
Responding to a Teacher with a website of teaching tools (appended below). K.S., I appreciate your noticing the key phrase “ask the dumb questions” in my comment. It’s fishing for better questions generally that I was writing about. I’m sort of a specialist in the “unasked but obviously unexplained” stuff. Usually we only “see” our
2nd Post to FRIAM following yesterday’s post (1st follows) re: Stewart Kauffman’s ”Reinventing the sacred” lecture So, partly prompted by how it seemed Kauffman got there. There’s a particularly curious “hiding place” for nature’s accumulative individuality and complex behavior within an otherwise “deterministic” universe obeying universal natural laws… Between the laws,… a “hiding place” for nature’s
Dan Bloom had commented: ” I SEE NO WAY OUT FROM THIS MESS. but it won’t hit the fan until 200, 400 more years…. until then, maybe until 2100 at least, we will muddle along….and the climate tsunami, when it hits, it won’t hit all at once, like in Thailand, it will hit the beach
Letter to John Smart, I’m very interested in your Evo-Devo Universe project. I also found some interesting examples of development, that operates by multi-level selection. Below is a bit of a very nice clear example, a case of punctuated equilibrium occurring by a series of rapid evolutionary progressions (spurts), for a plankton species, G. tumida.
Re: Letters to Science in response to the paper by Tim Searchinger of Princeton and R. A. Houghton of Woods Hole et. all. in February. It surprised the scientific world by documenting the oversights in calculating the environmental impacts of bio-fuels. Biofuel production consumes food resources and produce added CO2. It happens by causing the
Re: Lester Brown’s “THE FLAWED ECONOMICS OF NUCLEAR POWER” Circulated by Charlie Hall to his “peak oil’ list for comment. Lester has been among the most farsighted observers of the collision between man and earth. Charlie, Lester does his usual great job, and makes everyone’s usual great error. He expertly addresses a part of the puzzle without
Anselmo, How evolution seems to have alternated in majestic cycles in developing the oxygen atmosphere is indeed a wonderful thing to discover. I expect that theory of how the banded Iron formations in Proterozoic rocks might have been caused will hold up. To put it in the larger context, the cycles you speak of from