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A NEW BOOK:

Global Insanity:  How Homo sapiens lost touch with reality while transforming the world

Written/Edited by: James A. Coffman & Donald C. Mikulecky
2012, ISBN 9781938158049 (160 pages), Emergent Publications

The Global Economy that sustains the civilized world is destroying the biosphere. As a result, civilization, like the Titanic, is on a collision course with disaster. But changing course via the body politic appears to be well nigh impossible, given that much of the populace lives in denial. Why is that? And how did we get into such a fix?

In this essay, biologists James Coffman and Donald Mikulecky argue that the reductionist model of the world developed by Western civilization misrepresents life, undermining our ability to regulate and adapt to the accelerating anthropogenic transformation of the world entrained by that very model. An alternative worldview is presented that better accounts for both the relational nature of living systems and the developmental phenomenology that constrains their evolution. Development of any complex system reinforces specific dependencies while eliminating alternatives, reducing the diversity that affords adaptive degrees of freedom: the more developed a system is, the less potential it has to change its way of being. Hence, in the evolution of life most species become extinct.

This perspective reveals the limits that complexity places on knowledge and technology, bringing to light our hubristically dysfunctional relationship with the natural world and increasingly tenuous connection to reality. The inescapable conclusion is that, barring a cultural metamorphosis that breaks free of deeply entrenched mental frames that made us what we are, continued development of the Global Economy will lead inexorably to the collapse of civilization.

Coffman and Mikulecky take on the pillars of Enlightenment science—determinism, conservation and the continuum—and leave them in rubble. They see the scientific wisdom of the 20th Century departing ever further from reality, casting society into a breach of deep cognitive dissonance, a.k.a., insanity!
Robert E. Ulanowicz
Department of Biology, University of Florida

Hooked on growth and headed for collapse. It is a depressing story. But Coffman and Mikulecky offer hope in focusing on the rebirth that will follow. And more importantly, they provide the intellectual tools for comprehending the broad sweep of what is taking place. A 21st Century analysis for a 21st Century problem.
John McCrone
Science writer and author of Going Inside: A Tour Around a Single Moment of Consciousness

This is a very current critique. The authors assemble input from most of the unfolding perspectives in science—self-organization, complexity, development, emergence, Aristotelian causal analysis, and internalism/semiotics... to suggest ways of formulating our cultural and social problems in hopes of generating a rational standpoint for confronting them.
Stan Salthe
Professor Emeritus, Biology, City University of New York and Visiting Scientist in Biological Sciences Binghamton University

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THE CHAPTER THAT LED TO THE NEW BOOK:

Even more than life itself: beyond complexity(word file)

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ALSO

 EXCITING!

A  BOOK BY A. H. LOUIE:

MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF: A SYNTHETIC CONTINUATION IN RELATIONAL BIOLOGY

A. H. Louie’s More Than Life Itself is an exploratory journey in relational biology, a study of life in terms of the organization of entailment relations in living systems. This book represents a synergy of the mathematical theories of categories, lattices, and modelling, and the result is a synthetic biology that provides a characterization of life. Biology extends physics. Life is not a specialization of mechanism, but an expansive generalization of it. Organisms and machines share some common features, but organisms are not machines. Life is defined by a relational closure that places it beyond the reach of physicochemical and mechanistic dogma, outside the reductionistic universe, and into the realm of impredicativity. Function dictates structure. Complexity brings forth living beings.

 A Whole Volume  full of new work by Rosen's Students, Colleagues, Critics and others

System Theory and Biocomplexity (Commemorative Issue, Robert Rosen)
Chemistry and Biodiversity: Volume 4. Issue 10 October 2007

MY PAPERS: 

EDITORIAL: ROSEN, HIS STUDENTS AND HIS COLLEAGUES:  A GLIMPSE INTO THE PAST AND THE FUTURE

CAUSALITY AND COMPLEXITY: THE MYTH OF OBJECTIVITY IN SCIENCE

MY WORK AND RELATED ITEMS

 CHAPTERS:

COMPLEXITY SCIENCE AS AN ASPECT OF THE COMPLEXITY OF SCIENCE

in

Worldviews, Science and us

pp 30 - 53

Calos Gershenson, Diedrik Aerts and Bruce Edmonds, Editors

World Scientific 2007

The circle that never ends: Can complexity be made simple?

appearing  in "Complexity in Chemistry, Biology, and Ecology", D. Bonchev and D. H. Rouvray, Eds., KLUWER Academic, New York, 2005.

LECTURES:

TEACHING SCIENCE THAT MATTERS: REFRAMING THE QUESTION IN SCIENCE

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WHY DO WE BELIEVE WHAT WE DO

LECTURE AT VCU CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF BIOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY

OCTOBER 9 2006

ROBERT ROSEN AND GEORGE LAKOFF: THE ROLE OF CAUSALITY IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS

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RELATIONAL SYSTEMS THEORY AN APPROACH TO COMPLEXITY

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REDUCTIONISM AND COMPLEXITY: CONTINUUM OR DICHOTOMY?

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NEW LECTURE:

Don't look at the whole organism: Framing the question in science

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NEW PAPERS: