Essays, Elucidations, Exegesis
1. Thriving in a Complex World
Read moreAnd the things best to know are first principles and causes. For through them and from them all other things may be known but not they through the things covered by them. . . . But these things, the most universal, are perhaps the most difficult things for men to grasp, for they are farthest removed from the senses.
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The Great Matrix of Big History
Read moreUnderstanding Natural Hierarchies through Big History Buy the Book: Applied Big History Our European ancestors once understood the universe to be a Great Chain of Being. All the entities of the world — animal, vegetable, mineral — were hierarchically organized. At the bottom were metals, precious metals, and precious stones. Then came plants and trees, followed by wild animals and
The Economics of Cell Biology: A Little Big History
Read moreBuy the book! Getting Down to Business Economic metaphors help to better understand cell biology. In return cell biology teaches some first principles of economics. This “Little Big History” connects processes inside microbial organisms to processes of the global economy. Human Nerve Cell: Astrocyte grown in cultureCells are really small. You will recall that the diameter of a single hydrogen
Climates Change—Get Over It!
Read moreWe live on a restless planet. We wouldn’t be here otherwise. Our lineage, Homo sapien, began its social conquest of the planet some 200,000-year ago. Throughout the dramatic rise of our common ancestors, climates have changed. As ice ages advanced, enormous glaciers extending down from the poles sucked up the oceans of our planet turning them into mile-deep rivers of
Applied Big History: A Guide for Investors
Read moreBased on a talk given at the Research Retreat of Canyon Partners September 10, 2014, Beverly Hills, CA “If you don’t do macro, macro will do you.” —Daniel Och, CEO of Och-Ziff Capital Management Group Hedge funds are looking for competitive advantages in long-term investments. You want to understand large-scale market trends and investment opportunities in different segments of the
The Competent Outsider
Read moreWhat does it mean to be a “competent outsider”? This has been a major challenge in my life. I grew up during school desegregation and struggled with black and white lines that divided Wilmington, Delaware, and the rest of the country in the 1960s. I have traveled widely and lived abroad on several occasions—Israel, Germany, and Sri Lanka. I studied and
Mathematics and Game of Thrones
Read moreLet us pick up where we left off in the last episode. The queen is dead, long live the queen! We’ll recall that in medieval European universities, theology was thought of as “the queen of the sciences,” but today, theology can make no such claim on this academic throne. To do so, I argued, she would need to fully embrace what we
The Queen of the Sciences
Read moreOur medieval ancestors understood theology to be the queen of the sciences. Her twin sister Sophia—the Greek word for “wisdom”—was also venerated in the discipline of philosophy. It was hard to tell the two beauties apart, but together they once ruled the many domains of human knowledge. Theology departments today, however, are increasingly irrelevant backwaters in the modern university, engaged
Religion und Naturwissenschaft
Read moreDie Grundlage eines sinnvollen Engagements zwischen Religion und Naturwissenschaft Vortrag für den RSNG-Jahreskongress der Akademie der Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart. 28.-30. September 2012 Zunächst möchte ich mich für die Gelegenheit bedanken, wieder bei Ihnen sein zu dürfen, um neue Perspektiven kennen zu lernen und meine Kompetenzen zu erweitern. Ich habe mich hier sehr wohlgefühlt und möchte die Gelegenheit nutzen, um mich bei
Recovery Planning for Climate Catastrophes
Read moreJoin with me in a thought experiment. Imagine a major planetary cataclysm. It could be a global nuclear war, a devastating pandemic, or perhaps rapid climate catastrophes. It could be a sleeper computer virus, wiping out all digital memory banks. In any of these scenarios, we would anticipate an economic and environmental collapse, though not necessarily in that order. The
Big History gets Bigger
Read moreIt was the first meeting of the International Big History Association, and it brought together 200 academics—university, secondary, and primary school educators from diverse disciplines, as well as some creatives and activists—united with a passion for putting together “the whole damn story.” Over the course of four days in Grand Rapids, Michigan, we were wowed by 143 presenters, performances, visualizations, and
Greece, the Global Economy, and Big History
Read moreWatching the sunset from the cliffs of the Santorini caldera attracts tourists from all over the world, I recently discovered on a family sailing trip in the Greek Islands. The Cyclades archipelago is one of the cradles of human civilization, dating back 6,000 years, when late Neolithic and early Bronze Age communities thrived here. They cultivated emmer wheat and wild
Energy Solutions from the Perspective of Big History
Read moreHumans now consume some 18 trillion watts of energy in a variety of forms—fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas); hydropower; nuclear; renewables (solar, wind, biomass, biofuels, and geothermal); and of course, the food that the 7 billion of us eat. Without this energy constantly running through the arteries of our global civilization, the world as we know it would collapse. Our
Easter: A Moveable Feast
Read moreEaster, you may have noticed, is not a fixed day in the calendar. While Christmas, in contrast, occurs reliably every year on Dec. 25, Easter wanders around on a given Sunday in late March or April. This year Easter will be celebrated on March 31, but in 2014 it will occur on April 20. The reason has to do with
Between Atheism and Fundamentalism
Read moreIn jest I call myself “a recovering Unitarian.” I was raised believing that all religions are the same, so we valued none of them, equally. While it is unfair to ascribe this view to Unitarian Universalists in general, it was true of my congregation in that time and place. In church we sang traditional hymns, but the verses had been
Engaging the New Metanarrative
Read moreScience is progressive, and it tends toward consensus of necessity. Science discovers, illuminates, and crafts facts, and we rely on these complex facts in practical ways. Unlike religion, science is pretty much the same collection of complex facts in all cultures around the world. These facts are uncovered with considerable effort by peer-reviewed scientific guilds around a multitude of specializations
Telling Time: A Correlated Big History
Read moreThe challenge of measuring time reaches back to the origins of human consciousness. From a 28-day periodicity of the moon (and human female menstruation), early humans derived the concept of a month divided into four weeks of seven rising and setting suns. From the 365.25-day solar cycle, humans derived the concept of a year. And because 365 is not evenly
History as Science
Read moreHistory is generally considered part of the humanities, a discipline alongside literature and languages, philosophy and the arts. The humanistic study of history focuses on the interpretation of the written word and other cultural artifacts created by humans in ages past. The invention of writing marks the division between “history” and “pre-history.” Writing developed in Mesopotamia and Egypt beginning around
The Neurosciences of Bar Mitzvah
Read moreAttending a recent Bar Mitzvah ceremony, I was impressed, once again, by the wisdom of this ancient tribal initiation ceremony. The 13-year-old boy (or girl, in what’s called a Bat Mitzvah) is surrounded by family and friends as he recites the Torah portion in Hebrew and offers a short sermon about the importance of the reading. The ceremony takes place
The New Silent Majority
Read moreWhen Thanksgiving dinner conversation drifts into religious dogma, here is the way I’ll respond, with a wink and a smile: “That’s nice, Aunty. Thank you for sharing. But I am spiritual, not religious. I love the Brussels sprouts and chestnuts. Did you make that dish?” It is a polite way to change the subject. In the U.S., it is increasingly
Christmas: A Meditation
Read moreThe Christmas story is subversive, so we try to render it safe and saccharine. Contrast the idea of God as some great, all-powerful being in the sky with the icon of the helpless baby in the manger. The former, many imagine, micromanages all the details of our lives and the nightly news; the other needs his diaper changed. The Christmas
Ha! Philosophy of Science at the Comedy Club
Read moreBack in 1989, I fell into a doctoral program when I discovered a passion and talent for teaching. Since falling in with Metanexus, I left the tenure-career track and became an itinerant professor, teaching occasional courses here and there—UPenn, Swarthmore, Peradeniya, and CCNY. Over the years, I have found myself in exciting teaching situations in universities and lecture halls all
Climates Change
Read moreWe need a back up plan! In the face of the cold sciences and heated debates about climate change, we should remember first and foremost that climates do indeed change. Do not assume that the seasonal patterns humans have adapted to and enjoyed around the world for the last 10,000 years are a permanent fixture. Climates change and civilization needs
Peak Humanity
Read moreI was born in 1957. Eisenhower was president. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik. The Cold War was heating up, even as McCarthyism literally died out. Science and technology were all the rage. Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story debuted on Broadway. Leave It to Beaver with its vision of the ideal American family premiered on television. There were 2.8 billion people
Millennialism at the Singularity
Read moreReflections on the Metaphors, Meanings, and Limits of Exponential Logic Imagine billions of nanobots, tiny computerized machines smaller than your red blood cells, travelling through your body, inserted in your brain, all communicating internally with each other and externally with machines outside of your body. These nanobots could repair damaged cells in your body, destroy cancer cells, eliminate pathogens, provide
Reducing your Tech Overhead
Read moreHow a Small Nonprofit Made Simple Tech Tweaks and Saved $176,000 The Chronicle of Philanthropy February 20, 2011 Like many nonprofits struggling in the economic downturn, my organization has tightened its belt. A year ago we reduced our work force from 10 to four staff members and cut our operating budget by almost two-thirds. The Metanexus Institute works to promote
Oh Say Can You See! Fireworks as Performance Art
Read moreFor twenty-two years Peter Schjeldahl and his wife Brooke Alderson have hosted a Fourth of July picnic at their summer home in the Catskills, New York. Schjeldahl is better known as the art critic for the New Yorker and an acclaimed poet, but his annual fireworks display has become a performance art piece of epic proportions. This explosive show is
Reinventing Science Education
Read moreGovernment and business leaders are worried about STEM education. There is a growing shortage in the United States of teachers and students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). Hundreds of million are invested in public-private initiatives to retrain STEM teachers and to recruit and prepare new STEM teachers. The initiatives rightly recognize the importance of STEM professionals to our
Avatar and the Collective Unconscious
Read moreChanneling 21st Century Ambivalences James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) takes us to a world beyond our imagination through the use of computer simulation to tell a powerfully real story about twenty-first century ambivalences. This paper analyzes the movie Avatar through the lens of archetypal psychology and the concept of ambivalence (Freud, Jung, et. al.). Theories of emplotment also help to understand
Post-Darwinism: The New, New Synthesis
Read moreA review of Ecological Developmental Biology: Integrating Epigenetics, Medicine, and Evolution, by Scott F. Gilbert and David Epel (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer 2009). As a combatant in the evolution wars here in the United States and abroad, I have penned and processed quite a few papers on the interpretation of evolution. This means also reviewing the vast literature in evolutionary psychology, particularly its attempts
A.N. Whitehead’s Metaphysics
Read moreResources and Problems In 1927, British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead was asked to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology at the University of Edinburgh. His talks were published two years later as Process and Reality, the book that introduced Whitehead’s process philosophy to the world and secured him a place in the canon of Western metaphysics. Today, Whitehead’s
Judaism in an Age of Science
Read moreUniversalism and Particularism A Review of Norbert M. Samuelson, Jewish Faith and Modern Science: On the Death and Rebirth of Jewish Philosophy, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. Modern Jews are torn between the particularist teachings of their religious tradition and the universalist aspirations of science (or maybe they should be more so). Of course, other religious traditions face similar
Astrobiology and the Human Prospect
Read moreIn the Heavens as It is on Earth: Astrobiology and the Human Prospect The collision occurred on February 10, 2009 over Siberia at 0455 GMT at an altitude of 790 kilometers (490 miles) above the Earth. An Iridium communications satellite struck a defunct Soviet-era Cosmos 2251 communications satellite. Scientists estimate that the collision speed of the two orbital objects was
Our Common Story: A Big History Syllabus
Read moreThis is a teachable moment — the best of times and the worst of times. How should we understand the world around us? Take with me a semester-long course on Big History. This “Short Course on Everything” will provide you an overview of the physical, chemical, biological, and human sciences. We will debate how to understand our new common story and what it
Nationalism, Terrorism, and Religion
Read moreIt has been my distinct privilege and pleasure to live in Sri Lanka these last eight months serving as a Senior Fulbright Fellow in the Department of Pali and Buddhist Studies at the University of Peradeniya. I have been able to travel widely in this beautiful country and to meet many, many truly wonderful people. I am here giving this
Teaching the History of Nature
Read moreTowards an Integrated Science Curriculum (1) The 20th century has seen enormous advances in science and technology. General science literacy, however, lags far behind the progress made by highly trained specialists in diverse disciplines. For instance, in the United States, arguably the most scientifically advanced country in the world, there is remarkable ignorance of basic scientific concepts, in spite of
Leeches on the Road to Enlightenment
Read moreNo one warned me about the leeches. I arrived at Nilambe Buddhist Meditation Centre early on a Saturday morning full of trepidation. The Centre is located high up on the side of a mountain about twenty kilometers south of Kandy, Sri Lanka, where I am spending the year as a Senior Fulbright Fellow teaching comparative religion in the Department of
Evolution as Revelation
Read moreA review of Thank God for Evolution!: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World (2007), by Michael Dowd. Japanese Buddhists use the term “the stench of Enlightenment,” or so I have been told, to describe someone who has newly achieved satori. The newly initiated or born-again religious believer is often just too much to take, hence
Eating Well Together
Read moreDonna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto It was a rainy fall day in Pennsylvania farm country. I was assisting the farmhand and the extension service veterinarian in separating the calves from a herd of some eighty Angus cows. The process involved herding the cattle into a pen and sending them one at a time through a shoot, where a vet inspection
Entangled Narratives
Read moreThe Hermeneutics of the Good Life in a World of Competing Metanarratives “Our first business will be to supervise the making of fables and legends, rejecting all which are unsatisfactory; and we shall induce nurses and mothers to tell their children only those which we have approved.” — Socrates in Plato’s Republic Modern humans, perhaps more than at any other time
Metanexus: The Challenge
Read moreMy charge tonight is to give a keynote in which I lay out what I think the major challenges are for Metanexus and the work ahead. I was not to offer a retrospective, but a prospectus, both intellectual and strategic. I would like to begin by unpacking our call for “the constructive engagement of religion and science”. I will first
Useless Arithmetic and Inconvenient Truths
Read moreA Review of Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future by Orrin H. Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, Columbia University Press, 2007. ISBN 0-231-13212-3 My story begins with the intriguing title of a new book — Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future . The authors are a father and daughter team. The father is Orrin H.
Review of Beinhocker The Origin of Wealth
Read moreIn Search of New Economic Metaphors for Biology A review of Eric D. Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics, Harvard Business School Press, 2006. _______________________________________________ What if biologists were to go back and reread economics? This is the question I want to foreground. It is well-known that Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection
Metanexus: The Very Idea
Read moreThe juxtaposition of the concepts “science” and “religion” in our civilization is a kind of Rorschach Test for all kinds of deeply held prejudices and beliefs. The terms are often thought of almost as antonyms and reflect a profound cultural ambivalence in our postmodern civilization. That is why we decided to create a new term, a neologism that in our
Science, Religion, and the Bomb
Read morePresented at the First International Congress on Religion and Science, Tehran, Iran, May 2006 I want to thank the organizers and sponsors of this First Iranian International Congress on Religion and Science. Many years and a lot of hard work brought us to this event. Much study and thought has gone into preparing the many wonderful lectures. Thank you also
Sleepless in Tehran
Read more2:00 AM. I woke up suddenly from a nightmare.1 It takes a few days to get over the jetlag. It may take a lifetime to get over this trip. Since arriving a few days ago, I plowed through a busy schedule and crashed each night after eleven, only to wake up again an hour or two later. Should I take a
Science, Semiotics, and the Sacred
Read moreSeeking Spiritual Information in the Deep Structure of Reality Our principal benefactor at Metanexus Institute is John Templeton, the 90-year-old visionary mutual funds manager of significant fame and accomplishment. Templeton is fond of using the term “new spiritual information” to describe the purpose of his philanthropic work in science and religion. With the explosion of information in the 20th century,
Ecology, Religion, and Science
Read morein The Encyclopedia of Religion, Second Edition, edited by Lindsay Jones, New York, Macmillian Reference, V. 1, 2005. The contemporary dialogue between religion and science is part of the foundation of the religion and ecology dialogue. Many of the contemporary luminaries in this dialogue—Ian Barbour, Holmes Rolston III, John Haught, John Cobb, Jr., and many others—also have published on ecological issues.
Universal Reason
Read moreScience, Religion, and the Foundations of Civil Societies Presented at the Institute for Wisdom and Philosophy, Tehran, Iran, May 9, 2005 In the name of God, the Compassionate and Merciful. At a time of heightened alienation and conflict between Islam and the West, there is an urgent need to promote a “dialogue of civilizations” as called for by President
Beyond Intelligent Design
Read moreThe English theologian William Paley wrote an influential book in 1802 entitled Natural Theology: Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature. Paley employed the metaphor of a watch discovered on a beach. One would not know who made the watch, but one could infer that there was certainly a watchmaker. In such a
