Evolution writ large

Using complexity science to search for unity in the natural sciences

Nature writ large is a mess. Yet, underlying unities pervade the long and storied, albeit meandering, path from the early Universe to civilization on Earth. Evolution is one of those unifiers, incorporating physical, biological, and cultural changes within a broad and inclusive cosmic-evolutionary scenario. Complexity is another such unifier, delineating the growth of structure, function, and d...

Energy rate density. II. Probing further a new complexity metric

Appraisal of the concept of energy rate density continues, as both a potential quantitative metric for complexity studies and a key feature of a unifying hypothesis for the origin and evolution of material systems throughout Nature writ large. This article extends a recent study reported in this journal, hereby analyzing normalized energy flows for an array of complex systems experiencing physi...

The Not so Great Writ: The European Court of Human Rights Finds Habeas Corpus and Inadequate Remedy: Should American Courts Reexamine the Writ

A unifying concept for astrobiology

Evolution, broadly construed, has become a powerful unifying concept in much of science – not only in the biological evolution of plants and animals, but also in the physical evolution of stars and planets, and the cultural evolution of society and its many varied products. This paper (1) explores the bulk structure and functioning of open, non-equilibrium, thermodynamic systems relevant to the...

Competition and Educational Productivity: Incentives Writ Large

Competition and Educational Productivity: Incentives Writ Large Friedman (1962) suggested that in general, unfettered markets ensure the efficient provision of goods and services. Applying this logic to Education, he recommended that students be provided with vouchers and allowed to purchase schooling services in a free market ((Friedman (1955, 1962)). Hoxby (2002) refines this argument and sug...

Evolutionary Units and Adaptive Intelligence

Many people use the term “global brain” to mean any collaborative system (between people or machines) that can do some computation or task that the individual components can't do on their own. This is simply the classic dream of Distributed Artificial Intelligence writ large – lots of bits of computation and thought combine to give a better result. In contrast, in this paper I will take the ter...