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Evolution beyond Newton, Darwin, and entailing law: the origin of complexity in the evolving biosphere
Abstract
My large aim in this chapter is to take us from our deeply received scientific world view and, derived from it, our view of the “real world” in which we live, that is, from the understanding of the world that was spawned by Newton and modern physics to an entirely different, newly vibrant, surprising, partially unknowable world of becoming in which the living, evolving world, biological, economic, and cultural co-creates, in an often unprestatable mystery, its own possibilities of becoming. If the latter perspective is right, we are beyond Newton, and even beyond Darwin, who, in all his brilliance, did not see that without natural selection “acting” at all to achieve it, the evolving biosphere creates its own future possibilities. And we will see, at the foundations of all this, that no laws entail the evolution of the biosphere, economy, or culture. But the biosphere is the most complex system we know in the universe. If it arose beyond entailing law, we must ask how this can be possible? More, is that “how” a hint to how complexity emerges at least in the living world, and perhaps in the abiotic universe? We will begin to see ourselves in the living, evolving world in a world of inexplicable and unforeseeable opportunities that emerge with neither the “action” of natural selection in the evolving biosphere, or often without intent in the human world, that we partially co-create. It will follow that we live in not only a world of webs of cause and effect, but webs of opportunities that enable, but do not cause, often in unforeseeable ways, the possibilities of becoming of the biosphere, let alone human life. But, most importantly, I seek in this new world view a re-enchantment of humanity, of which this chapter may be a part. Our disenchantment following from Newton led to modernity.
... | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2017.728 mechanics-yields the very flaws of energy leakage generating the discovery of thermodynamics, entropy, dissipative structures, the self-organization of nature, and even life itself (Brooks & Wiley 1988;Kauffman 1993;Kauffman 2013). ...
... | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2017.728 mechanics-yields the very flaws of energy leakage generating the discovery of thermodynamics, entropy, dissipative structures, the self-organization of nature, and even life itself (Brooks & Wiley 1988;Kauffman 1993;Kauffman 2013). ...
... It was a bifurcation that dramatically and quickly reorganized the internal design of most organisms and the relations between them. Once again, the phase-change of boiling water comes to mind: after some billions of years of imperceptibly increasing population of life, a critical threshold (the limited chemical food supply) was finally breached, and a phasechange occurred (Kauffman 1993). life. ...
World-Systems Theory and Complexity Theory are siblings from the same parent of Von Bertalanffy’s foundational work on general systems theory. But they were ideologically separated at birth. World-Systems emerged out of dependency theory, itself a product of and reaction to neocolonialism after World War Two. Wallerstein’s historical analysis of the origins of unequal exchange in the “long” 16th C., first within Europe, and then encompassing its colonies, extended dependency theory’s exposure of exploitation by demonstrating the systemic consistency of geopolitical parasitism well before the modern era. Christopher Chase-Dunn has furthered that insight by using empirical research on the unequal exchange between the earliest known polities. His work has additionally shown how the methods of cross-polity parasitism have changed over time, both creating and undermining the empires of history in response to changing ecological and climatic constraints. His work also shows how systemic change often starts in the creative conditions unique to semiperipheries. The other child of general systems theory evolved in the worlds of physics and computer science, becoming known first as Chaos and later Complexity theory. It too expanded, demonstrating that positive causal feedback loops of energy and information could explain the life-processes of biology and evolutionary theory. Given their common ancestry and attention to the flows of energy and information, their re-connection was inevitable. This paper seeks to merge them. The approach will be to use complexity to explain how entropy builds structures on a physical level, then how those same dynamics created life, drove evolution, and continue to drive social complexity from our nomadic roots to our current global strife. The work of Chase-Dunn will be shown as logically consistent with complexity theory, and ideally a marriage of the traditions completed. As a former student and life-long colleague of Chase-Dunn’s, the author is also paying homage while pointing a way forward.
... A fortiori, the same holds for the evolution of the economy, legal systems, social systems, and culture. Because I have discussed this before with my colleagues Longo and Montevil (1,2) and elsewhere, (3,4), my discussion of this first point will be rather brief. 2) What I shall choose to call, after Aristotleʼs four causes, noted below, Formal Cause Laws derived from specific "ensemble theories" tell us about the world. ...
... The title of this section is also, without capitals, the title of an article by Giuseppe Longo, Mael Montevil, two French mathematicians at the Ecole National Superieur, Paris, and myself, posted on Physics ArXhiv Jan 11, 2012, (1), and subsequently published, (2). In addition, I have myself expanded upon it in other publications, some now published, (3,4). I urge the reader to consult the Physics ArXhiv posted paper or the published version under the title of this section for the most detailed discussion of these topics relating the evolution of the biosphere to physics. ...
... This claim says that the becoming of the biosphere is not merely a web of cause and effect" but also of enabled adjacent possible "opportunities", "seized" by unentailed and typically unprestatable evolutionary innovations which constitute the "arrival of the fitter", an issue never solved by Darwin. 4) In a new analogy to the boundary conditions of classical and quantum mechanics, the ever changing actual "context" of the biosphere constitutes "enabling constraints" that as enabling constraints "create" the Adjacent space of possibilities into which evolution can become. Then that becoming creates a new specific evolutionary situation or context of actual adaptations that again act as enabling constraints creating ever new, typically unprestatable Adjacent Possible directions for evolution. ...
Newton set the stage for our view of how science should be done. We
remain in what I will call the `Newtonian Paradigm' in all of physics,
including Newton, Einstein, and Schrodinger. As I will show shortly,
Newton invented and bequeathed to us `efficient cause entailing laws'
for the entire becoming of the universe. With Laplace this became the
foundation of contemporary reductionism in which all that can happen in
the world is due to efficient cause entailing laws. More this framework
stands as our dominant way to do science. The Newtonian Paradigm has
done enormous work in science, and helped lead to the Industrial
Revolution, and even our entry into Modernity. In this paper I propose
to challenge the adequacy of the Newtonian Paradigm on two ground: 1)
For the evolution of the biosphere beyond the watershed of life, we can
formulate no efficient cause entailing laws that allow us to deduce the
evolution of the biosphere. A fortiori, the same holds for the evolution
of the economy, legal systems, social systems, and culture. Because I
have discussed this before with my colleagues Longo and Montevil (1,2)
and elsewhere, (3,4), my discussion of this first point will be rather
brief. 2) What I shall choose to call, after Aristotle's four causes,
noted below, Formal Cause Laws derived from specific `ensemble theories'
tell us about the world. But Formal Cause Laws are not reducible to
efficient cause entailing laws of the Newtonian Paradigm and,
critically, have already, unnoticed, crept into biology concerning the
origin of life, and economics concerning economic growth. Formal cause
laws appear to be a new way to do science, independent of efficient
cause entailing laws. Thus Formal Cause laws can be independent of any
specific material substrate. This may bear on the sufficiency of
Materialism in our account of the world.
... Hence, fitness (of either a system or a trait) and niche are related such that the meaning of one depends upon the nature of the other; to have an understanding of either one, we must first identify a specific context where both niche and fitness provide a means of mutual explication. Kauffman (2013) has gone considerably further than Thurner to propose a number of implications for evolution that may follow from both Harris's and Thompson's positions. "If we are right, entailing law, the centrepiece of physics since Newton, ends at the watershed of evolving life" (173). ...
... This is to say that if the interactions of symbiotic, mutualistic organisms are capable of supporting the reproduction of each separately, and the self-differentiation of the system as a whole, then Gaia is a viable theory. Kauffman (2013) articulates a view that is in many ways indistinguishable from Harris and AE by extending his conception of the Kantian whole (including autocatalytic systems and cells) to the biosphere. Interestingly, he argues that although such wholes are themselves unpredictable, they can "become collectively autocatalytic", and the process by which this occurs is that of "the phase transition"-the same as for all chemical reactions (187). ...
As Harris’s philosophy of mind is fairly extensive, I confine my focus to only the central thread of his argument concerning efforts to naturalize subjectivity and knowledge. Towards this end, in Sect. 7.2, I clarify Harris’s anticipation of the autopoietic enactivism (AE) approach to consciousness. In this section I also establish a preliminary reformation of the hard problem to be elaborated in the following discussions. In Sect. 7.3, I assess Harris’s and Damasio’s respective appeals to Spinoza’s conception of ideatum as a model of mind and contrast these approaches with more recent arguments from embodied cognition. In Sect. 7.4 this line of thought is extended to Spinoza’s concept of conatus in order to clarify how Harris’s theory of self-awareness relates to corresponding views from embodied and embedded theses of mind.
... Hence, fitness (of either a system or a trait) and niche are related such that the meaning of one depends upon the nature of the other; to have an understanding of either one, we must first identify a specific context where both niche and fitness provide a means of mutual explication. Kauffman (2013) has gone considerably further than Thurner to propose a number of implications for evolution that may follow from both Harris's and Thompson's positions. "If we are right, entailing law, the centrepiece of physics since Newton, ends at the watershed of evolving life" (173). ...
... This is to say that if the interactions of symbiotic, mutualistic organisms are capable of supporting the reproduction of each separately, and the self-differentiation of the system as a whole, then Gaia is a viable theory. Kauffman (2013) articulates a view that is in many ways indistinguishable from Harris and AE by extending his conception of the Kantian whole (including autocatalytic systems and cells) to the biosphere. Interestingly, he argues that although such wholes are themselves unpredictable, they can "become collectively autocatalytic", and the process by which this occurs is that of "the phase transition"-the same as for all chemical reactions (187). ...
Errol E. Harris (1908–2009) devoted his life to grappling with the big questions concerning the relationships between nature, mind, and knowledge. His 70-plus year career was distinguished, his texts on the history of philosophy, philosophy of science, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and consciousness were widely published, and yet his metaphysics has until now been unrecognized within mainstream discussions. The aim of this chapter is to introduce and briefly situate Harris’s metaphysics within the history of philosophical ideas and motivate the arguments to follow. By way of introduction, Sect. 1.2 outlines the major historical developments in process philosophy and phenomenology that have given rise to Harris’s system. Section 1.3 introduces the scientific theories developed independently in recent decades, which both are supportive of Harris’s methods and may serve to unite traditions of process ontology and phenomenology moving forward. Section 1.4 distils the central arguments to be discussed in the chapters to follow.
... Hence, fitness (of either a system or a trait) and niche are related such that the meaning of one depends upon the nature of the other; to have an understanding of either one, we must first identify a specific context where both niche and fitness provide a means of mutual explication. Kauffman (2013) has gone considerably further than Thurner to propose a number of implications for evolution that may follow from both Harris's and Thompson's positions. "If we are right, entailing law, the centrepiece of physics since Newton, ends at the watershed of evolving life" (173). ...
... This is to say that if the interactions of symbiotic, mutualistic organisms are capable of supporting the reproduction of each separately, and the self-differentiation of the system as a whole, then Gaia is a viable theory. Kauffman (2013) articulates a view that is in many ways indistinguishable from Harris and AE by extending his conception of the Kantian whole (including autocatalytic systems and cells) to the biosphere. Interestingly, he argues that although such wholes are themselves unpredictable, they can "become collectively autocatalytic", and the process by which this occurs is that of "the phase transition"-the same as for all chemical reactions (187). ...
In this chapter the principles of Harris’s holism are presented and compared with contemporary theses from a range of fields. Here, the aim is to demonstrate that Bohm’s implicate order and enactivism rely upon the same concepts of dialectical relations, holism, and process ontology as Harris’s system. I argue that within Harris’s metaphysical framework, a symbiotic merging of these camps holds significant theoretical promise for a transdisciplinary paradigm shift. The aim of Sect. 2.2 is to introduce Harris’s conceptions of internal relations, scale of forms, and the Concrete Universal. Using these terms, Harris’s epistemology and approach to the problem of consciousness are outlined. In Sect. 2.3, the theories of autopoiesis and embodiment are introduced under the enactivist paradigm, which is the closest contemporary position to Harris’s theories of life and mind. In Sect. 2.4, David Bohm’s implicate order is introduced as a quantum mechanical theory partially anticipated by Harris and consistent with enactivist theories of mind. In Sect. 2.5, a synthesis of these three camps is proposed, which sets the course for the following chapters.
... Hence, fitness (of either a system or a trait) and niche are related such that the meaning of one depends upon the nature of the other; to have an understanding of either one, we must first identify a specific context where both niche and fitness provide a means of mutual explication. Kauffman (2013) has gone considerably further than Thurner to propose a number of implications for evolution that may follow from both Harris's and Thompson's positions. "If we are right, entailing law, the centrepiece of physics since Newton, ends at the watershed of evolving life" (173). ...
... This is to say that if the interactions of symbiotic, mutualistic organisms are capable of supporting the reproduction of each separately, and the self-differentiation of the system as a whole, then Gaia is a viable theory. Kauffman (2013) articulates a view that is in many ways indistinguishable from Harris and AE by extending his conception of the Kantian whole (including autocatalytic systems and cells) to the biosphere. Interestingly, he argues that although such wholes are themselves unpredictable, they can "become collectively autocatalytic", and the process by which this occurs is that of "the phase transition"-the same as for all chemical reactions (187). ...
The aim of this chapter is to elucidate how Harris’s metaphysics of evolution purports to bridge the gap between mind and cosmos, thereby providing a phenomenological ontology. In Sect. 8.2, I outline Harris’s appeal to dynamic systems theory (DST) in neuroscience and his anticipation of theories depicting consciousness as “phase of matter”. Here, I consider possible implications this proposition has for autopoietic enactivism (AE). In Sect. 8.3, I reconsider the teleological anthropic principle (TAP) in light of Harris’s response to the hard problem and highlight some consequences this theory has for a naturalization of knowledge. I argue Rapoport’s and Rosen’s independent conceptions of Klein bottle logic serve as a suitable analogue of Harris’s reasoning and extension of AE’s appeal to second-order science. In the final Sect. 8.4, I outline Harris’s contention that consciousness is a scale and argue that the resulting model reveals a cosmological dimension for the enactivist paradigm.
... De esta manera, la Biología confirma que el tiempo no implica erosión, pérdida, desgaste o muerte, sino todo lo contrario: creación o aprovechamiento de oportunidades, creación de posibilidades, diversificación, robustez y vida (Maldonado & Gómez, 2010b). Kauffman (2013) considera que actualmente nos encontramos más allá de Newton e, incluso, del mismo Darwin, quienes no vieron que, sin la intervención de la selección natural, la biosfera creó su propio futuro de posibilidades. Por ello, la evolución no logró explicar el origen de la vida, pero sí logró resolver uno de los problemas: la lógica de lo que hacen los sistemas vivos para vivir. ...
This book introduces the reader into the first attempt toward a theory of health, not of illness or disease. The claim is that the sciences of complexity open up and pave the road too such a theory.
... It is not a blowup doll nor a folding protein in any sense. Nevertheless, the selfconstruction of embryos does seem to involve purpose, at least in the limited sense of analogy to a thermostat (Gordon & Stone, 2016), whose compatibility with the current "laws of nature" is problematic (Gordon & Gordon, 2016), as is any concept of function, doing, agency or purpose (Kauffman, 2013). There may be design here, but not in the ID sense. ...
... These processes may now be understood as fundamental complex causal processes. According to Kauffman (2013), "we live in both a web of cause and effect and a web of enabling opportunities that enable new possible directions of becoming" (p. 181; emphasis added). ...
This contribution is about the opening of a new perspective on education. This possibility is based on new thinking in complexity about the role of complexity in education. The focus is on understanding generative complexity as self-potentiating; that is, on how complexity is actually generated in the real world. Generative complexity offers the possibility of linking complexity to the concept of transition in “the transitory child.” This concept may be linked to the concept of the so-called Zone of Generativity, and be expanded to the Space of Generativity as a multidimensional, dynamic state hyperspace. The challenge is to show how these concepts may be linked to the opening and enlarging of new spaces of possibility for learning and development in education. New ways of thinking are needed to understand the generative complexity involved. This calls for rethinking the concepts of interaction, causality, and the unit of study. It is urgently needed to become explanatory about the nature of (self-) generative principles and (self-) generative mechanisms, being operative in complex generative processes of generative learning and development. Generative learning and the achievement of individual and collective generativity may be viewed as thriving on the full generative power of interaction.
... For space 16 × 16, we could speak about practical irreversibility only, when reversibility is possible, although very improbable, but for real molecular systems where the number of cells is commensurate with the Avogadro's number (6.02 × 10 23 ), irreversibility becomes practically absolute. After all, the chances of reversibility become so incredibly small that millions and millions of times of the universe's existence is not enough to carry out at least one spontaneous transition accompanied by a decrease in the number of degrees of freedom and complexity, which, among other things, supports the idea of Stuart Kauffman [30] about the nonergodicity of the universe. ...
In this article, we analyze the interrelationships among such notions as entropy, information, complexity, order and chaos and show using the theory of categories how to generalize the second law of thermodynamics as a law of increasing generalized entropy or a general law of complification. This law could be applied to any system with morphisms, including all of our universe and its subsystems. We discuss how such a general law and other laws of nature drive the evolution of the universe, including physicochemical and biological evolutions. In addition, we determine eliminating selection in physicochemical evolution as an extremely simplified prototype of natural selection. Laws of nature do not allow complexity and entropy to reach maximal values by generating structures. One could consider them as a kind of "breeder" of such selection.
... This daring suggestion has not yet been properly tackled. Kauffman (2013) contests these claims, yet offers no objective explanation of why. In a recent book review, McShea (2013) takes a neutral position on Morris's ideas. ...
... Their rationales and experimental tests in support of this contention are summarized by Zimmer (2013). Similarly, Kauffman (2013) attempts to explain complexity to emerge even without natural selection to help it along. In opposition to these views by Gould, McShea, and Kauffman, Lineweaver et al. (2013 p. 7) maintain that a definition of complexity as an increase in variation without the involvement of natural selection merely describes an increase in entropy, an approach to equilibrium rather than an increase of complexity. ...
In this paper, I discuss the concept of complexity. I show that the principle of natural selection as acting on complexity gives a solution to the problem of reconciling the seemingly contradictory notion of generally increasing complexity and the observation that most species don’t follow such a trend. I suggest the process of evolution to be illustrated by means of a schematic diagram of complexity versus time, interpreted as a form of the Tree of Life. The suggested model implies that complexity is cumulatively increasing, giving evolution a direction, an arrow of time, thus also implying that the latest emerging species will be the one with the highest level of complexity. Since the human species is the last species evolved in the evolutionary process seen at large, this means that we are the species with the highest complexity. The model implies that the human species constitutes an integral part of organic evolution, yet rendering us the exclusive status as the species of the highest complexity.
The goal of this chapter is to present the dialectical holist stance on key topics in philosophy of biology as a theoretical bridge to Harris’s metaphysics of mind. In Sect. 6.2, I set out Harris’s necessary and sufficient conditions for life and in subsequent sections I compare these contentions with contemporary accounts. The central issues to be discussed in this chapter will be whether the notion of the unifying principle (ϕ) can be applied to the simplest unit of life, and if so, to establish what if any further philosophical insight this provides into the natures of life, evolution, and mind. In Sect. 6.3, I outline Harris’s argument that the explicative process () subsumes and broadens Neo-Darwinism. Here I address whether formal governance in collective living systems provides teleological direction to biological evolution. In the final section, I show that for both Harris and AE, positing formal governance across a range of biological systems implies the Gaia theory.
The alleged opposition between design arguments and evolution goes back to the discussions between Darwin and Asa Gray, and this chapter analyzes both traditional and contemporary ways of formulating the opposition. The chapter shows how responses to contemporary anti-evolutionist objections and advances in the understanding of the requirements of evolution point to an understanding of evolution in which the wider teleology of the cosmos is crucial for explaining the biological forms that evolution produces. I argue that as biologists continue to explore “laws of form” and other features of nature that provide some directionality of evolution, the alleged opposition between design and evolutionary explanations is weakened.
Este documento de investigación (working paper) estudia lo que no existe hasta la fecha: el desarrollo de una teoría de la salud, no de la enfermedad. Para ello, el mejor marco, se afirma, es el diálogo entre ciencias de la salud y ciencias de la complejidad.
As our understanding of biological evolution continues to deepen, tension still surrounds the relationship between competition and cooperation in the evolution of the biosphere, with rival viewpoints often associated with the Red Queen and Black Queen hypotheses respectively. This essay seeks to reconcile these viewpoints by integrating observations of some general trends in biosphere evolution with concepts from game theory. It is here argued that biodiversity and ecological cooperation are intimately related, and that both tend to cyclically increase over biological history; this is likely due to the greater relative stability of cooperation over competition as a means of long-term conflict resolution within ecosystems. By integrating this view of the biosphere with existing models such as Niche Game Theory, it may be argued that competition and cooperation in ecosystems coexist at equilibria which shift preferentially towards increasing cooperation over biological history. This potentially points to a state of “cooperative equilibrium” as a limit or endpoint in long-term biosphere evolution, such that Black Queen and Red Queen behavior dominate different phases in an evolutionary movement towards optimal cooperative stability in ecological networks. This concept, if accepted, may also bear implications for developing future mathematical models in evolutionary biology, as well as for resolving the perennial debate regarding the relative roles of conflict and harmony in nature.
Reinventing education is the ultimate aim of this contribution. The approach taken is a radical new complexity-inspired bottom-up approach which shows complexity as the fount of creativity and innovation. Organizing complexity accordingly may be the foundation for a new complexified vision of education. It all starts with new thinking in complexity about how complexity is actually generated in the real world. Such thinking offers new kinds of complexity like generative and emergent complexity. The approach taken is very much inspired by the genius of Vygotsky, as a visitor from the future. His focus was not only process-oriented, but also very much possibility-oriented. His method was bottom-up, and opened new spaces of the possible, like the Zone of Proximal Development. Yet he was not able to deal with the problem of complexity in his days. He ‘simply’ lacked an adequate causal framework, which showed causation as a generative bottom-up process, to be linked with potential nonlinear effects over time. He could not explain what he saw as possible: the turning points and upheavals of learning and development. In this contribution the focus will be on the link between the new thinking in complexity and the causal, generative nature of complexity in the real world. This link may show the ontological creativity of the entire world in general, and of human learning and development in particular. It may show the power of generativity to unleash this creativity by a new way of theorizing on education. The complexity-inspired theory of development as generative change, as thriving on the generative power of interaction, is fundamental and foundational for this new theorizing.
The free-energy principle states that all systems that minimize their free energy resist a tendency to physical disintegration. Originally proposed to account for perception, learning, and action, the free-energy principle has been applied to the evolution, development, morphology, anatomy and function of the brain, and has been called a postulate, an unfalsifiable principle, a natural law, and an imperative. While it might afford a theoretical foundation for understanding the relationship between environment, life, and mind, its epistemic status is unclear. Also unclear is how the free-energy principle relates to prominent theoretical approaches to life science phenomena, such as organicism and mechanism. This paper clarifies both issues, and identifies limits and prospects for the free-energy principle as a first principle in the life sciences.
Time is the most enigmatic “property” of our world but it seems that for the ancients, time has not been too much a quagmire. In the Orient time just did not exist—indeed, it is difficult to find any long-running account of the history of India. The same attitude has been observed not only in the old civilizations of the American continent and among the African Bushmen but interestingly also in ancient Greece. It thus appears that the notion of time as a dimension of objective reality distributed uniformly between the equally important past, present, and future is if not an invention, then at least an idiosyncrasy of the Western civilization, with its ingenious mastery of processes, and accordingly, the necessity of vast memorization and planning. However, time in biological systems appears in a guise quite different from that in mathematics or classical physics, where time is essentially transformed into space, enabling an equally efficient movement in both (past and future) directions. The peculiarity of the biological perception of time can be readily explained at the molecular level using a simplified model of the paradigmal lac operon of the bacterium Escherichia coli.
The dynamics of the modern Earth-system is not explicable without reference to systems that have a purpose, i.e., that exhibit goal-seeking behavior. This paper develops the physical basis of agency or purposiveness in the technosphere-the human-technological system that defines the Anthropocene-as part of an analysis of the organizational requirements of energy-dissipating systems. The regulative, or framing, approach used here avoids reliance on reductive modeling and aims instead at establishing general properties of purposive systems. Establishment of purposiveness (the condition of having a purpose) as a physical system property, rather than a metaphysical concept or a purely biological phenomenon, enables a new look at the role of humans and human purpose in the Anthropocene. This approach can help avoid the misleading anthropocentric assumption that humans are independent authors of the Anthropocene they inhabit, rather than contingent actors whose purposes are not entirely their own.
This chapter reviews three major models in psychology relevant to the present work—the biopsychosocial model, complexity/NLDST, and embodiment. In Young (Development and causality: Neo-Piagetian perspectives. New York: Springer Science + Business Media, 2011), I reviewed in depth the first two of these models. All three models are considered wide-ranging, integrative ones.
However, each of the models includes limitations—for example, each possesses properties that make it difficult to apply clearly to the domains that have been considered under its scope.
In this regard, the biopsychosocial model suffers from a lack of precise mechanisms in how its major components might interact to produce a behavior at issue (e.g., illness, psychopathology) or how the treatments under its guise might work. Also, the NLDST approach provides a generic approach to describing system states and their change, as well as the processes that might bring about the change, but it has not made the widespread inroads in psychology predicted for it. Part of the reason might lie in the different approaches that are espoused under its umbrella (as well as its complex mathematics and its different approach to variability in behavior, which is considered “noise” in many of the standard approaches in psychology but the primary subject matter in this approach to psychology).
Finally, the embodied approach is only beginning to prosper as a potentially unifying one in psychology, and it too needs to work on specific mechanisms than entrain development and change, or else it will be considered simply as a redescription of behavioral phenomena rather than a model with sufficient explanatory transformative acumen. Certainly, this present work is dedicated to integrating these various integrative models in psychology and providing them with a reliable and valid suite of change mechanisms that can help explain stability/instability and gradual/abrupt changes in behavior.
As for key terms in this chapter, there are a few for the biopsychosocial approach, given its prevalence throughout the present book. I refer to the psychological component of this model as the “personal” one because all three components are involved in the psychology or behavior and it makes no sense to consider one of the components of the term as especially psychological when, in essence, all three are psychological in nature. It is important to note that the three components involved in the model are not as distinct as their separate presentation might indicate.
Some examples of the biological, psychological (personal), and social components of the model included in the present book follow. These examples are taken from throughout the book and not uniquely from this chapter that is being summarized here.
For the biological component of the biopsychosocial model, among others, the present work examines the influence on behavior of genes/epigenetics; Gene × Environment (G × E) interactions and correlated G × E (rGE); the brain and brain networks (the Connectome, structural, and functional); lateralization and hemispheric specialization; evolution, life history theory, and differential susceptibility; as well as the stress response and its major physiological systems (hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis; sympathetic adrenal medullary (SAM) system), and critical molecular biochemicals and neurotransmitter components (cortisol, norepinephrine, glucocorticoid receptors) and their action on neurons and the brain.
For the psychological (personal) component of the biopsychosocial model, among others, the book examines aspects of the self; self-control/regulation (cognitive, emotional); executive function; relevant cognitive acquisitions, including belief; resilience and coping; personality and temperament; motivation and attention; and free will and resource (ego) depletion.
For the social component of the biopsychosocial model, among others, the book explores cultural and societal influences; socioeconomic status (SES), minority status, and other demographics; prenatal influences, early adversity, early life experiences; parenting, parenting style, and schooling; maltreatment, abuse; buffering the environment, etc.
Clearly, free will is a major anchor of the present book. Another component to the personal agency in behavioral causation that I introduce in this chapter concerns passion. I review the definition of passion and also the questionnaire currently in use in evaluating it and, in both regards, develop better ones.
As for the complexity and NLDST, they especially refer, in particular, respectively, (a) to complex adaptive systems, networks, and agents and (b) to attractors, self-organization, emergence, fractals, and circular causality. They also refer to collective autocatalytic sets and to complexity pyramids, as well as to control and order parameters, respectively.
The key terms and concepts in the embodiment model of behavior are proliferating. The embodiment model has been differentiated into strong, secondary, hybrid, and radical versions. A similar model is that of radical enactivism. It has been applied to cognition, affect, the brain (e.g., the mirror system), and even the extended mind, inter-brain, embodied attunement, and conjoined people (through joint attractors). It incorporates extended concepts of behavior, such as body-becoming-mind and the brain–body–environment landscape, yet also quite basic ones, such as chemosignals in intersubjectivity and force dynamics in language and sociality. Some of its concepts are rarified, such as having a hypergrip on affordances and also hermeneutic realism. As for my contributions to the area of embodiment, I develop the concepts of embodied causation or etiology and of causal or etiological embodiment. Also, I refer to the human species as Homo Causa in this chapter and to the causalization process as inimical to who we are and how we become.
Validating the Anthropocene as a new epoch and dating its start preoccupies many contributors to this journal. Awareness of anthropogenic change, rather than change itself, is my concern here. When, how and to whom did major human impacts became apparent? Some supposed Earth-reshaping effects have been actual, others illusory or exaggerated, still others conjectural or prospective. Attributions of causative human agency stem not only from empirical observation and historical accounts, but also from deeply embedded notions of religious purpose and moral propriety. I sketch the history of impact awareness and the utility of Anthropocene precedents. I then discuss the pioneering insights of George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882), the first to combine observations of ongoing terrestrial transformations with historically based analyses of cumulative impacts. In conclusion, I stress the relevance of Marsh’s awareness of deforestation, soil erosion, desertification, flooding, biotic impoverishment, and prospective systemic changes for an Earth at risk from less immediately visible but even graver, longer-lasting, more globalized and more intractable anthropogenic damage.
Biological systems are highly complex, and for this reason there is a considerable degree of uncertainty as to the consequences of making significant interventions into their workings. Since a number of new technologies are already impinging on living systems, including our bodies, many of us have become participants in large-scale "social experiments". I will discuss biological complexity and its relevance to the technologies that brought us BSE/vCJD and the controversy over GM foods. Then I will consider some of the complexities of our social dynamics, and argue for making a shift from using the precautionary principle to employing the approach of evaluating the introduction of new technologies by conceiving of them as social experiments.
Ultimately we will only understand biological agency when we have developed a theory of the organization of biological processes, and science is still a long way from attaining that goal. It may be possible nonetheless to develop a list of necessary conditions for the emergence of minimal biological agency. The authors offer a model of molecular autonomous agents which meets the five minimal physical conditions that are necessary (and, we believe, conjointly sufficient) for applying agential language in biology: autocatalytic reproduction; work cycles; boundaries for reproducing individuals; self-propagating work and constraint construction; and choice and action that have evolved to respond to food or poison. When combined with the arguments from preadaptation and multiple realizability, the existence of these agents is sufficient to establish ontological emergence as against what one might call Weinbergian reductionism. Minimal biological agents are emphatically not conscious agents, and accepting their existence does not commit one to any robust theory of human agency. Nor is there anything mystical, dualistic, or non-empirical about the emergence of agency in the biosphere. Hence the emergence of molecular autonomous agents, and indeed ontological emergence in general, is not a negation of or limitation on careful biological study but simply one of its implications.
The Critique of the Power of Judgment (a more accurate rendition of what has hitherto been translated as the Critique of Judgment) is the third of Kant's great critiques following the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. This translation of Kant's masterpiece follows the principles and high standards of all other volumes in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. This volume, first published in 2000, includes: the indispensable first draft of Kant's introduction to the work; an English edition notes to the many differences between the first (1790) and second (1793) editions of the work; and relevant passages in Kant's anthropology lectures where he elaborated on his aesthetic views. All in all this edition offers the serious student of Kant a dramatically richer, more complete and more accurate translation.
Proto-organisms probably were randomly aggregated nets of chemical reactions. The hypothesis that contemporary organisms are also randomly constructed molecular automata is examined by modeling the gene as a binary (on-off) device and studying the behavior of large, randomly constructed nets of these binary “genes.” The results suggest that, if each “gene” is directly affected by two or three other “genes,” then such random nets: behave with great order and stability; undergo behavior cycles whose length predicts cell replication time as a function of the number of genes per cell; possess different modes of behavior whose number per net predicts roughly the number of cell types in an organism as a function of its number of genes; and under the stimulus of noise are capable of differentiating directly from any mode of behavior to at most a few other modes of behavior. Cellular differentiation is modeled as a Markov chain among the modes of behavior of a genetic net. The possibility of a general theory of metabolic behavior is suggested. Analytic approaches to the behavior of switching nets are discussed in Appendix 1, and some implications of the results for the origin of self replicating macromolecular systems is discussed in Appendix 6.
Systems chemistry seeks to find fundamental insights into the emergent properties of complex systems and living matter. Thus chemists use a "bottom-up" approach for the design and integration of simple elements as a means of producing self-organized systems that can serve as feasible models. Toward this end, networks of replicating molecules have been produced and their dynamic behavior was analyzed both experimentally and by simulation. In this paper we describe our analysis of the reaction mechanisms which build up these systems. To do so, we revisit models for self-replication and template assisted catalysis and expand them to describe the kinetics of small catalytic networks. From symmetry requirements and reasonable chemical assumptions, it is shown that the construction of increasingly complex networks requires higher order catalysis. Specifically, we explain why low order catalysis, in which a monomeric molecule serves as a template, is incapable of efficiently activating cooperative cross catalytic elements and basic asymmetric sequentially linked units, so that at least second order catalysis, in which dimeric molecules serve as templates, is necessary. These cooperative and asymmetric linked units are required components of more complex molecular networks. We compare our results with other experimental evidence for the centrality of higher order catalysis and discuss the implications of our results on molecular self-organization and other aspects of systems chemistry.
RNA enzymes have been developed that undergo self-sustained replication at a constant temperature in the absence of proteins. These RNA molecules amplify exponentially through a cross-replicative process, whereby two enzymes catalyze each other's synthesis by joining component oligonucleotides. Other RNA enzymes have been made to operate in a ligand-dependent manner by combining a catalytic domain with a ligand-binding domain (aptamer) to produce an 'aptazyme'. The principle of ligand-dependent RNA catalysis has now been extended to the cross-replicating RNA enzymes so that exponential amplification occurs in the presence, but not the absence, of the cognate ligand. The exponential growth rate of the RNA depends on the concentration of the ligand, allowing one to determine the concentration of ligand in a sample. This process is analogous to quantitative PCR (qPCR) but can be generalized to a wide variety of targets, including proteins and small molecules that are relevant to medical diagnostics and environmental monitoring.
This article investigates the possibility that the emergence of reflexively autocatalytic sets of peptides and polypeptides may be an essentially inevitable collective property of any sufficiently complex set of polypeptides. The central idea is based on the connectivity properties of random directed graphs. In the set of amino acid monomer and polymer species up to some maximum length, M, the number of possible polypeptides is large, but, for specifiable "legitimate" end condensation, cleavage and transpeptidation exchange reactions, the number of potential reactions by which the possible polypeptides can interconvert is very much larger. A directed graph in which arrows from smaller fragments to larger condensation products depict potential synthesis reactions, while arrows from the larger peptide to the smaller fragments depict the reverse cleavage reactions, comprises the reaction graph for such a system. Polypeptide protoenzymes are able to catalyze such reactions. The distribution of catalytic capacities in peptide space is a fundamental problem in its own right, and in its bearing on the existence of autocatalytic sets of proteins. Using an initial idealized hypothesis that an arbitrary polypeptide has a fixed a priori probability of catalyzing any arbitrary legitimate reaction to assign to each polypeptide those reactions, if any, which it catalyzes, the probability that the set of polypeptides up to length M contains a reflexively autocatalytic subset can be calculated and is a percolation problem on such reaction graphs. Because, as M increases, the ratio of reactions among the possible polypeptides to polypeptides rises rapidly, the existence of such autocatalytic subsets is assured for any fixed probability of catalysis. The main conclusions of this analysis appear independent of the idealizations of the initial model, introduce a novel kind of parallel selection for peptides catalyzing connected sequences of reactions, depend upon a new kind of minimal critical complexity whose properties are definable, and suggest that the emergence of self replicating systems may be a self organizing collective property of critically complex protein systems in prebiotic evolution. Similar principles may apply to the emergence of a primitive connected metabolism. Recombinant DNA procedures, cloning random DNA coding sequences into expression vectors, afford a direct avenue to test the distribution of catalytic capacities in peptide space, may provide a new means to select or screen for peptides with useful properties, and may ultimately lead toward the actual construction of autocatalytic peptide sets.
Proto-organisms probably were randomly aggregated nets of chemical reactions. The hypothesis that contemporary organisms are also randomly constructed molecular automata is examined by modeling the gene as a binary (on-off) device and studying the behavior of large, randomly constructed nets of these binary “genes”. The results suggest that, if each “gene” is directly affected by two or three other “genes”, then such random nets: behave with great order and stability; undergo behavior cycles whose length predicts cell replication time as a function of the number of genes per cell; possess different modes of behavior whose number per net predicts roughly the number of cell types in an organism as a function of its number of genes; and under the stimulus of noise are capable of differentiating directly from any mode of behavior to at most a few other modes of behavior. Cellular differentation is modeled as a Markov chain among the modes of behavior of a genetic net. The possibility of a general theory of metabolic behavior is suggested.
The ability of systems of molecular reactions to be simultaneously autocatalylic and sustained by some ambient 'food source' of simple molecules may have been an essential step in the origin of life. In this paper we first describe a polynomial-time algorithm that determines whether any given set of molecules, reactions and catalysations contains a subsystem that is both autocatalytic and able to be sustained from a given subset of the molecules. We also describe some combinatorial properties of this algorithm, and show how it can be used to find irreducible auto-catalysing and sustaining subsystems. In the second part of the paper we use the algorithm to investigate random catalytic networks-in particular, a model described by Kauffman. Using simulations and some analytic techniques we investigate the rate of catalysis that is required for the emergence of autocatalytic and sustaining subsystems.
Spherical bounded structures such as those formed by surfactant aggregates (mostly micelles and vesicles), with an inside that is chemically and physically different from the outside medium, can be seen as primitive cell models. As such, they are fundamental structures for the theory of autopoiesis as originally formulated by Varela and Maturana. In particular, since self-reproduction is a very important feature of minimal cellular life, the study of self-reproduction of micelles and vesicles represents a quite challenging bio-mimetic approach. Our laboratory has put much effort in recent years into implementing self-reproduction of vesicles as models for self-reproduction of cellular bounded structures, and this article is a further contribution in this direction. In particular, we deal with the so-called matrix effect of vesicles, related to the fact that when fresh surfactant is added to an aqueous solution containing preformed vesicles of a very narrow size distribution, the newly formed vesicles (instead of being polydisperse, as is usually the case) have dimensions very close to those of the preformed ones. In practice, this corresponds to a mechanism of reproduction of vesicles of the same size. In this article, the matrix effect is re-elaborated in the perspective of the origin of life, and in particular in terms of the prebiotic mechanisms that might permit the growth and reproduction of vesicles. The data are analyzed by dynamic light scattering with a new program that permits the calculation of the number-weighted size distribution. It is shown that, on adding a stoichiometric amount of oleate micelles to preformed oleate vesicles extruded at 50 and 100 nm, the final distribution contains about twice the initial number of particles, centered around 50 and 100 nm. The same holds when oleate is added to preformed phospholipid liposomes. By contrast, when the same amount of oleate is added to an aqueous solution (as a control experiment), a very broad distribution ranging between 20 and 1000 nm is obtained. The data can then be seen as a kind of reproduction of the same size vesicles, and the argument is advanced that this may correspond to a simple prebiotic mechanism of vesicle multiplication in prebiotic times, when only physical forces might be responsible for the basic mechanisms of early protocell growth and division. Preliminary data also show that repeated addition of oleate maintains the same basic initial features, and that surfactants other than oleate also respect the reproductive mode of the matrix effect.
We determine conditions under which a random biochemical system is likely to contain a subsystem that is both autocatalytic and able to survive on some ambient 'food' source. Such systems have previously been investigated for their relevance to origin-of-life models. In this paper we extend earlier work, by finding precisely the order of catalysation required for the emergence of such self-sustaining autocatalytic networks. This answers questions raised in earlier papers, yet also allows for a more general class of models. We also show that a recently described polynomial-time algorithm for determining whether a catalytic reaction system contains an autocatalytic, self-sustaining subsystem is unlikely to adapt to allow inhibitory catalysation--in this case we show that the associated decision problem is NP-complete.
Emotion: a self-regulatory sense
- K T Piel
A self-replicating hexadesoxynucleotide
- von Kiedrowski