Nature's many varied complex systems-including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society-are islands of order within the increasingly disordered Universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological, or cultural evolution, which together comprise the grander interdisciplinary subject of cosmic evolution. A wealth of observational data supports the hypothesis that increasingly co...

We begin with premises about natural science, its fundamental protocols and its limitations. With those in mind, we construct alternative descriptive models of consciousness, each comprising a synthesis of recent literature in cognitive science. Presuming that consciousness arose through natural selection, we eliminate the subset of alternatives that lack selectable physical phenotypes, leaving...

Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor methods results partly from incentives that favour them, leading to the natural selection of bad science. This dynamic requires no conscious strategizing—no...

A primary motivation for research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of natural ecosystems. Ecosystems arc thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex, dynamic problems. However, the biological processes that contribute to these properties have not been made explicit in Digital Ecosystem research. Here, we introduc...

We aim to develop a text mining framework capable of identifying and extracting causal dependencies among changing variables (or events) from scientific publications in the cross-disciplinary field of oceanographic climate science. The extracted information can be used to infer new knowledge or to find out unknown hypotheses through reasoning, which forms the basis of a knowledge discovery supp...

the preceding chapters, we have emphasized the necessity of knowing the influence of various physical and biological factors upon some ecosystem variable of interest if economic methods fo assessing the benefits 1? of controlling acid precipitation are to be applied.— At the same time, we have formulated several analytical and empirical characterizations of the acid precipitation problem intend...

About the author. . . . Frederick Engels (1820-1895), as the son of a German textile manufacturer who owned factories in England, became so concerned about fate of textile workers he published The Condition of the Working Classes in England. He saw the textile worker as a new societal force leading to a rational ordering of social life, superseding capitalism. In collaboration with Karl Marx, E...

If computer science is to truly become a “science,” as Newell, Perlis, and Simon originally conceived, then it must integrate three equally ascendant perspectives: mathematics, science, and engineering. The scientific perspective can help us to understand computational tools and computation itself, through the articulation of enduring, technology-independent principles that uncover new approach...

Through an exploration of theoretical physics, this paper suggests the need for regrounding natural science in phenomenological philosophy. To begin, the philosophical roots of the prevailing scientific paradigm are traced to the thinking of Plato, Descartes, and Newton. The crisis in modern science is then investigated, tracking developments in physics, science's premier discipline. Einsteinia...