Dr. Frank Ryan

פורסם: 9.04.12, 2:51 am

Field of reference: Biology

Description: symbiosis is key to evolution

“Symbiosis, the "living together of differently named organisms" is far more important in the evolution of life and the functioning of organisms and ecologies than the competition-centric views of Darwin's early defenders asserted, and may be the key driving force in the evolution of life on earth.”

Link to the book review


שייך לנושאים: 1-13 - חינוך אינטגרלי, -מקורות מדעיים, הטבע, 1. רמת קשר
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Max Borders

פורסם: 22.03.12, 5:47 am

Field of reference: Sociology, Ecology, Politics

Description: Building society as a balanced ecosystem.

“What rises up above the ecosystem metaphor to glow distinctly about human society is human subjectivity itself, with all its unmet desires and Sisyphean searches for happiness. It is in the teaming associations among millions of subjectivities in search of an ever-changing pluralism of human values that we find something unique to human society, something not fully captured in any of our metaphors. As we attempt to limn something like the laws and limits of human organization, we must be struck by the understanding that something so lifeless as a rule can animate a holistic system of seekers, strivers and their subjectivities. As Hobbes teaches and Mises channels, inter-subjective agreement on these lifeless rules makes for the bases of society, and such agreement, too, is contingent: Not every interhuman relation is a social relation. When groups of men rush upon one another in a war of outright extermination, when men fight against men as mercilessly as they crush pernicious animals and plants, there is, between the fighting parties, reciprocal effect and mutual relation, but no society. Society is joint action and cooperation in which each participant sees the other partner’s success as a means for the attainment of his own.  Internal to our species, we must seek peace through free association, or more specifically, the rules of free association.  In the human ecosystem, however, one finds all the mystery, beauty, prosperity and happiness that institutions make possible. Whereas natural institutions rely as much on predation and parasitism as mutualism, human ecosystems flourish where predation and parasitism are in decline. When informal  norms of mutual respect and trust are built atop those formal rules, an invisible scaffolding of toleration gets built into our culture, too. In other words, we don’t simply obey the rules, we internalize them. And the more we internalize them, the less we have need for those enforcement apparatuses that can so quickly be captured by those for whom power is an end.”

Link to the article


שייך לנושאים: 1-13 - חינוך אינטגרלי, -מקורות מדעיים, הטבע, 1. רמת קשר
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Max Borders

פורסם: 22.03.12, 5:44 am

Field of reference: Sociology, Ecology, Politics

Description: Building society as a balanced ecosystem.

“But one must never forget that the characteristic feature of human society is purposeful cooperation; society is an outcome of human action, i.e., of a conscious aiming at the attainment of  ends. No such element is present, as far as we can ascertain in the processes which have resulted in the emergence of the structure-function systems of plant and animal bodies and in the operation of the societies of ants, bees, and hornets. Human society is an intellectual and spiritual phenomenon. It is the outcome of a purposeful utilization of a universal law determining cosmic becoming, viz., the higher productivity of the division of labor. As with every instance of action, the recognition of the laws of nature is put into the service of man’s efforts to improve his conditions.”

Link to the article


שייך לנושאים: 1-13 - חינוך אינטגרלי, -מקורות מדעיים, הטבע, 1. רמת קשר
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Max Borders

פורסם: 22.03.12, 5:42 am

Field of reference: Sociology, Ecology, Politics

Description: Building society as a balanced ecosystem.

“In conclusion, we have argued that society as family, society as hive, and society as machine all fail to capture those structural-functional aspects that allow us to grasp something essential about human civilization. My hope is that in this paper, I have identified what the best and most powerful modelmetaphor for complex society. With the society as ecosystem, we can move forward consciously with a research agenda that builds on the isomorphs we enumerated, while constraining our ethics, politics and philosophy with tentative answers to the question of whether there might be laws of human organization.”

Link to the article


שייך לנושאים: 1-13 - חינוך אינטגרלי, -מקורות מדעיים, הטבע, 1. רמת קשר
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Thomas Huxley

פורסם: 22.03.12, 5:40 am

Field of reference: Biology

Description: Evolution, attaining new levels of existence.

“The different branches of science combine to demonstrate that the universe in its entirety can be regarded as one gigantic process, a process of becoming, of attaining new levels of existence and organization, which can properly be called a genesis or an evolution.”

Link to the article


שייך לנושאים: 1-13 - חינוך אינטגרלי, -מקורות מדעיים, הטבע, 1. רמת קשר
להשאיר תגובה |