Evolutionary Worlds Without End

In Evolutionary Worlds without end, Henry Plotkin considers whether there is any general theory in biology, including the social sciences, that is in any way equivalent to the general theories of physics. He starts by examining Ernest Rutherford's dictum as to what science is. In the later chapters he considers the possibility, within an historical framework, of a general theory being based upon selection processes. --

In the nineteenth century, many American Protestants expected almost limitless, orderly progress as Christianity and democracy spread and as technology and prosperity increased. Yet they also believed that, many centuries hence, after progress had run its course, the Second Coming of Jesus and a supernatural End to the world would occur. If these Protestants had one foot in the world of steamships and the telegraph, the other remained firmly planted in the cosmos of the Apocalype--a universe where angels poured out vials of wrath, where the dead would rise again, and where the wicked would be cast forever into a lake of burning fire.

The science of finding habitable planets beyond our solar system and the prospects for establishing human civilization away from our ever-less-habitable planetary home. Planet Earth, it turns out, may not be the best of all possible worlds—and lately humanity has been carelessly depleting resources, decimating species, and degrading everything needed for life. Meanwhile, human ingenuity has opened up a vista of habitable worlds well beyond our wildest dreams of outposts on Mars. Worlds without End is an expertly guided tour of this thrilling frontier in astronomy: the search for planets with the potential to host life. With the approachable style that has made him a leading interpreter of astronomy and space science, Chris Impey conducts readers across the vast, fast-developing field of astrobiology, surveying the dizzying advances carrying us ever closer to the discovery of life beyond Earth—and the prospect of humans living on another planet. Since the first exoplanet, or planet beyond our solar system, was discovered in 1995, over 4,000 more have been pinpointed, including hundreds of Earth-like planets, many of them habitable, detected by the Kepler satellite. With a view spanning astronomy, planetary science, geology, chemistry, and biology, Impey provides a state-of-the-art account of what’s behind this accelerating progress, what’s next, and what it might mean for humanity’s future. The existential threats that we face here on Earth lend urgency to this search, raising the question: Could space be our salvation? From the definition of habitability to the changing shape of space exploration—as it expands beyond the interests of government to the pursuits of private industry—Worlds without End shows us the science, on horizons near and far, that may hold the answers.

In these conversations with film maker and writer Lucette Verboven, Thomas Keating OCSO – bestselling author, Trappist monk and founder of the Centering Prayer movement – looks back on his long life and spiritual development. Following on from his previous books Invitation to Love, Open Mind, Open Heart and The Mystery of Christ, Father Keating now turns his attention to the themes of awakening, the nature of true happiness and the character and purpose of death. World Without End also contains an interview with Abbot Joseph Boyle OCSO, who presides over the monastery where Father Keating is resident, high in the Rocky Mountains in Snowmass, Colorado. Verboven's insightful questions probe into the depths of Father Keating's spirituality, discussing identity, transformation, silence, nature and the cosmos – themes universal and applicable to all those searching for a deeper and more meaningful life.

Marjorie Suchocki's ground-breaking work "The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context (SUNY, 1988) serves as the backdrop for a series of essays by distinguished Christian philosophers and theologians on the usefulness of process thought for the articulation of a contemporary Christian Eschatology in the light of postmodernism and contemporary natural science.

People worry that computers, robots, interstellar aliens, or Satan himself – brilliant, stealthy, ruthless creatures – may seize control of our world and destroy what’s uniquely valuable about the human race. Cultural Evolution and its Discontents shows that our cultural systems – especially those whose last names are "ism" – are already doing that, and doing it so adeptly that we seldom even notice. Like other parasites, they’ve blindly evolved to exploit us for their own survival. Creative arts and humanistic scholarship are our best tools for diagnosis and cure. The assemblages of ideas that have survived, like the assemblages of biological cells that have survived, are the ones good at protecting and reproducing themselves. They aren’t necessarily the ones that guide us toward our most admirable selves or our healthiest future. Relying so heavily on culture to protect our uniquely open minds from cognitive overload makes us vulnerable to hijacking by the systems that co-evolve with us. Recognizing the selfish Darwinian functions of these systems makes sense of many aspects of history, politics, economics, and popular culture. What drove the Protestant Reformation? Why have the Beatles, The Hunger Games, and paranoid science-fiction thrived, and how was hip-hop co-opted? What alliances helped neoliberalism out-compete Communism, and what alliances might enable environmentalism to overcome consumerism? Why are multiculturalism and university-trained elites provoking working-class nationalist backlash? In a digital age, how can we use numbers without having them use us instead? Anyone who has wondered how our species can be so brilliant and so stupid at the same time may find an answer here: human mentalities are so complex that we crave the simplifications provided by our cultures, but the cultures that thrive are the ones that blind us to any interests that don’t correspond to their own.

"Nothing about the evolution of biological complexity makes sense except in the light of synergy." Peter Corning's new book is being hailed as a major contribution to what is perhaps the greatest shift in our understanding of evolution since The Origin of Species. It's a tour de force that takes us on a synergy-guided tour of the history of life. As Corning puts it, "life on Earth has been a synergistic phenomenon from the get go." Corning also shows how synergy has been a key to human evolution, including the rise of complex modern societies. "Cooperation may have been the vehicle, but synergy was the driver." As we now face a tipping point and another major transition in evolution, Corning offers us a synergy-based road-map to the future. "One of the great take-home lessons from the epic of evolution is that cooperation produces synergy, and synergy is the way forward. The arc of evolution bends toward synergy." Contents: Explaining Complexity A New View of Evolution How Cooperation Trumps Competition Evolution as a "Combination of Labor" A Tale of Two Theories The Major Transitions in Evolution The Self-Made Man I: Australopithecine Entrepreneurs The Self-Made Man II: From erectus to Homo sapiens The Rise of Complex Societies The Next Major Transition Readership: Undergraduate, graduate students and the general public interested in general science, general life sciences, evolutionary biology, human biology/anthropology/primatology, and public policy. Keywords: Synergy;Cooperation;Complexity;Evolution;Natural Selection;Human Evolution;Major Transitions in Evolution;Cultural Evolution;Multi-Level SelectionReview: "This magnificent book reveals the critical role of synergy in evolution and in all of biology, including especially in humankind. Synergy is fundamental in so many areas of science and knowledge. And in his final chapter, on how to change our current dysfunctional course as a species and avoid the destruction of our planet, Peter Corning offers us a unique and hopeful new vision." Anthony Trewavas, FRS Emeritus Professor, Institute of Molecular Plant Science, University of Edinburgh and author of Plant Behaviour and Intelligence "Peter Corning's approach is wise and he is astonishingly well read. The scope of his excellent book is broad and ambitious, running from the origins of life to modern economics in human societies. Many of his examples are described in clear and fascinating detail ... He writes extremely well and I read every word with great pleasure and interest ... I am full of admiration and strongly recommend it." Sir Patrick Bateson, FRS Emeritus Professor of Biology, Cambridge University president of the Zoological Society of London and the author of (among others) Behaviour, Development and Evolution "This is an important book. It offers a solution to a problem that has been central to evolutionary biology for half a century, with implications that reach down to the foundations of evolutionary theory. Corning argues that the huge and disproportionate advantages that arise when labor is combined could account for the rise of ever higher levels of organization in the history of life. The book is also well written, a pleasure to read." Daniel W McShea Professor of Biology, Duke University and co-author of Biology's First Law "Peter Corning's book is a marvelous addition to the growing literature about the emerging alternative to gene-centric neo-Darwinism in evolutionary biology. We would not exist were it not for the cooperative behaviour of livin

Principles of Evolution covers all aspects of the subject. Following an introductory section that provides necessary background, it has chapters on the evidence for evolution that cover the fossil record, DNA-sequence homologies, and protein homologies (evo-devo). It also includes a full history of life from the first universal common ancestor, through the rise of the eukaryote and on to the major groups of phyla. This section is followed by one on the mechanism of evolution with chapters on variation, selection and speciation. The main part of the book ends with a chapter on human evolution and this is followed by appendices that expand on the making of fossils, the history of the subject and creationism. What marks this book as different from others on evolution is its systems-biology perspective. This new area focuses on the role of protein networks and on multi-level complexity, and is used in three contexts. First, most biological activity is driven by such networks and this has direct implications for understanding evo-devo and for seeing how variation is initiated, mainly during embryogenesis. Second, it provides the natural language for discussing phylogenetics. Third, evolutionary change involves events at levels ranging from the genome to the ecosystem and systems biology provides a context for integrating material of this complexity. The book assumes a basic grounding in biology but little mathematics as the difficult subject of evolutionary population genetics is mainly covered qualitatively, with major results being discussed and used rather than derived. Principles of Evolution will be an interesting and thought-provoking text for undergraduates and graduates across the biological sciences.