OF BUDAPEST, FIELD, CHAOS, AND COMPLEXITY THEORY

YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW

Three Quotes

... what’s now at stake in the battle for 21st century mind ... On one hand are gathered those of us who, out of 100,000 years of yearning, generation after generation have worked to advance evolution—that is, to build the better world through the revolution of higher expectation.

On the other hand are those of us who—blind captives of an antihuman paradigm and a counter-revolution of lower expectation—automatically, and tragically, have worked to check us in place or drive us backward.

The chapters ahead are dedicated to everyone who comes to life in these pages, whose work in turn worldwide was—and is—dedicated to getting us back on track in evolution.

—Prologue, Darwin's Second Revolution

At issue in the battles is whether we are to be guided:

• socially, by a theory and story of subhuman, inhuman, and inhumane evolution, or a theory and story of a fully human evolution.

• politically, by a theory and story of adaptation and accommodation, or a theory and story of assertion and aspiration.

• economically, by a theory and story of selfishness and greed as the key to wealth for the privileged—with, of course, a noble trickle down to the many. Or a theory and story of caring and sharing to spread the wealth of Earth to the many.
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• scientifically, by a reductionist theory and story oriented to the very deep past, or an expansionist theory and story oriented to today and the future.

• morally, by a theory and story of survival of the fittest and selfishness uber alles as the driver for human evolution, or a theory and story of love and moral sensitivity as the driver of human evolution.

• spiritually, by a theory and story of a ferocious God of my people versus your people, a God that must without question be obeyed. Or a merciful God of all people. Or no God at all, good will from on high and below, just favoring an abundant life for all.

—Epilogue, Darwin's Second Revolution

. . . once again the experience of the past shows that the paradigm of domination has only tenuously and temporarily been beaten back. Behind the ranting of those whom we would like to think may once again be safely considered the “lunatic fringe” lies the drive of the same captive millions to recoup, regroup, and with the same old goal once again push for absolute power.

What happened will happen again—potentially worse, much worse—until the lopsided theory and story that drove us to the edge of a cliff in evolution has been replaced with the grown-up theory and story that was Darwin’s and now is his progressive successors’ vision.

As Darwin wrote, it is the “relationship of organism to organism” that matters—that is, as all the great spiritual visionaries have said, it is what we do or do not do unto one another.

For thousands of years it has been so simple in the end.

—Epilogue, Darwin's Second Revolution

The power of progressive science lies in its capacity for accurate measurement to guide progressive action.

Based on the science of all the fields explored in the trilogy for Darwin and the Battle for 21st Century Mind, the new Global Sounding measure of personal and global health and wellbeing is the first broad-based, user-friendly measure of what drives us ahead, checks us in place, or drives us backward in evolution. 

Available through online book sellers or on order through book stores worldwide, these two new books provide basic forms and an easy guide on how to use the Global Sounding to help gain the world we want and deserve rather than the world we don’t want and don’t deserve.

Bankrolling Evolution shows how the Global Sounding can be used to heal and build the better world that the shift from the disaster of the Bush years to the hope for the Obama years has raised globally.

Measuring Evolution provides a guide to scientific background, relation to other measures now in global use, and specific scenarios for use of the Global Sounding by decision-makers in business, government, politics, science, education, the media, nonprofit and religious organizations, and philanthropists and foundations.

By providing a new way of monitoring positive versus negative indicators on fifteen basic levels and activities for evolution, the Global Sounding provides a new grounding for translation into fifteen basic tenets for a broad-based moral code.

By translating science into the language of poetry and spirituality, the Global Sounding Moral Code opens the way for a healing advance toward the ideal of a scientifically as well as morally and spiritually grounded Global Ethic of progressive secular as well as progressive religious appeal.

THE HOLE IN MODERN MIND

ONE

THE BATTLEGROUND

        What was the Battle All About? 

DARWIN'S LOST THEORY
       Sex, Revolution, and Evolution.

       Two Key Quotes. 

       Survival of the Fittest vs. Love,          Competition vs. Cooperation,         Selfishness vs. Moral

       Sensitivity.

THE BIOGRAPHERS
       Charles Darwin
       William Irvine
       Julian Huxley
       Loren Eisley
       Jastrow and Kovey
       Irving Stone
       Ronald Clark
       John Bowlby
       Randall Keynes
       Desmond and Moore
       Janet Browne

AN EARLY SKIRMISH
       John Maynard Smith
       Kaplan and Jennings
       D. Daiches Raphael
       Benjamin Farrington
       Gunther Stent

THE VANGUARD OF THE SUPER NEOS
          E. O.Wilson
       Robert Trivers
       Richard Dawkins
       Daniel Dennett

THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR
      Ashley Montagu

      Stephen Jay Gould
      Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin
      Howard Gruber
      Robert J. Richards

THE PUBLISHERS
       Princeton University Press
       University of Chicago-        

       Encyclopia Brittannica
       New York University
       Lightbinders
       Penguin
       Appleton
       The Ghiselin Quote

        Norton

THE REAR GUARD OF THE SUPER

NEOS
        Robert Wright
        Alexander’s Ragtime Morality
        The Bashing of Barash
        Robert Axelrod
        Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby

VANGUARD OF THE FUTURE I
        Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
        Robert Ornstein
        Augros and Stanciu
        Robert Wesson
        Stanley Salthe
        Depew and Weber      

LIBERALS, CONSERVATIVES, AND MORAL SENSE

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Two Quotes

      By now I must ask whether the reader shares with me this at times overwhelming sense of the surreal ... For isn't this the fundamental unsettlement we have been looking at?  That in all these books by all these people, to whom in one way or another Darwin has been meaningful, we have been looking at a sampling of the higher order minds of the 20th century ... And is not the most unsettling message this? That no matter how brilliant we are, how well educated, how brave, strong, or independent-minded we think we are, the invisible power of the over-riding paradigm we've explored, which worldwide still enslaves practically all of us from birth to death, can lead us around like a dancing bear with a ring through its nose?

      — Mind at the End of its Tether, The Battle of

               the Books

     The end result was that both liberals and conservatives collaborated in invisibilizing the Darwinian second half. They also engaged in what, if unchanged, could become the dance of death for our species through the invisibilizing of the higher truth about ourselves that drove Darwin originally to complete his theory ... For this is our life. This is the lives of our children, and their children. This is the destiny of our species we are looking at—not merely at two radically different kinds of people to be hated, feared, lampooned, or mocked by one another.

      — Liberals, Conservatives, and Moral Sense, The Battle of

               the Books.

       If science is to help win rather than help lose the battle for 21st century mind the theory of evolution must expand to deal with the evolutionary impact of the drive of liberal versus conservative, of progressive versus regressive, of the venturesome against the status quo.

In other words, what’s becoming the inescapably blunt, blatant truth of the matter is that our wobbly drive ahead in evolution is primarily driven by liberals, progressives, and the socially venturesome. We are being checked in place or driven backward by conservatives, regressives, and the status quo. And if we continue to timidly hold back from dealing with this equation in the scientific as well as the religious theory and story of evolution, we are doomed.

It is the challenge for the 21st century that the lockstep regression of Republicans vs. the wobbly progression of Democrats underlines as this book is being published.

— Liberals, Conservatives, and Moral Sense,

          The  Battle of the Books

For completion and publication in 2011, via an insider, back stage adventurer’s view, Up Against the Paradigm will tell the story of the battle within 20th century science to update and expand the theory and story of evolution to meet the enormous challenge of the 21st century.

The book will get underway with the story of a secret meeting by scientists behind the Iron Curtain in Budapest during the Cold War to see if something can be done about a prototypical problem for the 21st century. With global tension exponentially rising, they meet to see if a shift from a “survival of the fittest” to a “mutual aid” theory of evolution might help keep Russia and the United States from mutual nuclear annihilation.

Out of this beginning comes the formation of the General Evolution Research Group composed of scientists and scholars of many fields and many nations. Meeting in conferences with others throughout Europe, interfacing via the then new internet, bit by bit they gradually expand the data base for a theory of evolution pointed toward peace and plenty rather than more of what devastated the 20th century environmentally, socially, economically, politically, morally, and spiritually.

In this book we’ll meet the visionaries, innovators, and experts and join them in the excited juggling of new concepts in practically every field as they worked together—or courteously fought—to lay the ground-work and define the challenge for 21st century science and society.

Among the visionaries, innovators, and experts who come to life in this book are those who, more often joking than lamenting, mixed the pot for the following heady brew of concepts and fields for 21st century science and society.

From A to Z: Akashic field theory, autocatalysis, autogenesis, autopoesis. Chaos theory, complexity theory, cultural transformation theory, cybernetic theory. Dissipative structures, Domination systems, dominator morality. Evolutionary systems science, evolutionary systems theory, evolutionary action theory. Flow. Gaia hypothesis. Holographic brain, mind, and universe theory. Moral transformation theory. New language for evolution. Paranormal research and theory, Partnership systems, partnership morality, positive psychology. Quantum theory. Relationship dynamics. Self-organizing theory, spiral dynamics, systematic transvaluation, systems science. Two stream and single stream theory. Wilberian theory. Zero-sum game theory.

Within the past century two major ventures built the prevailing theory of the evolution of living systems. The first was what became the neoDarwinian paradigm during the early part of the century. The second was the sociobiological paradigm late in the century. Both made important contributions to science, but at the same time both shared the same monumental blind side.

Claiming the Darwinian heritage exclusively for themselves, they rigorously excluded everything that both in Darwin earlier and among later creative theorists across the full spectrum of science sought to expand evolution theory to capture the heights as well as the depths of our species’ potential and human evolution.

We are meeting here in Toronto to give new focus to what is by now a huge body of work routinely excluded from what is taught worldwide in our schools, in books reaching a general as well as scientific readership, and reinforced by television and other media as the one and only mainstream theory of evolution.

We meet for what we hope may become a decisive step toward what, if our species is to attain its potential, must become a successful third venture to advance the scientific theory of evolution.

We are meeting to move beyond a science overwhelmingly focused on the foundation for evolution and the past to a renewal of emphasis on and a new vision of the human superstructure and the future.

This is a matter of increasing urgency because it bears on what is to happen to our species at what has become the most crucial juncture in our evolution. We are meeting at a time of crisis in evolution and crisis in the development of evolution theory. We are meeting to move beyond the cosmic world and the microbiological world into the human world of a radical expansion of brain, mind, consciousness, and, level by level upward, the escalating questions that now press upon us of personal, cultural, social, political, economic, educational, and technological evolution.

Above all, as Darwin insisted, to this list must be added moral evolution, as well as—for it is high time for science to recognize this continuing concern for billions of our species on this planet—of spiritual evolution.

We are further meeting to move beyond a science committed solely to the passive role of the so-called objective observer to the active role of science as partisan on the behalf of and advocate of humanity.

In short, we are meeting to look at what a full spectrum, action-oriented theory of evolution should look like, and how to actually build it. We are meeting to move beyond talking about it not to discard what we already have. We meet to expand and update our theory and our story of evolution to live up to the 100,000 year investment by the life force in our species, and to fulfill the rising vision over all that time of what we can become and should become.