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April 15, 2009 at 0:28am

Robert Reid, Biological Emergences, MIT Press, 2007

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11165

This is a highly technical text: caveat lector! Non-biologists with a good science background, motivation and a half-decent IQ can hack it, though..

It is a worthy text for commited activists to tackle for several reasons. It applies the newly emerging meta-science of Complexity Theory (check out with a google search for links). CT is applied to analyze the structure and functions of biological systems and to the general question of biological evolution and what drives it. Reading the text will reveal to the thoughtful reader some of the major flaws of contempory thinking (? non-thought ? anti-thought ?) on issues such as ecology, development, and globalization.

For example, the reader will learn the importance of DIVERSITY and MODULARIZATION to the survival and evolution of living systems. This is important since modern practice is to radically reduce the diversity and modularity of social, economic and ecological systems. One need only consider the loss of genetic diversity of cultivated crops in modern agro-business economy: suicidal in a world of rapid, "unprecedented", global climate change! Again, the lack of modularity ("firewalls") in the modern globalized economy assures the propagation and generalization of the negative impacts of the contemporay financial / economic crises: a chain of dominos, one taking down the next, one would say..

Of particular interest is the author's emphasis on the NECESSITY of modularity for the creation of diversity which, in turn, provides the "raw materials" from which new forms of life and organization spontaneously emerge (and which even the classical Darwinian theory held were necessary inputs for Natural Selection to act upon..)

A sort of moral lesson can be gained from a contemplation of the importatant systemic phenomenon of "emergence" (novelty) in which complex, self-organizing (biological) systems adapt to stress or exploit newly available ecological niches. One can only conclude that by stressing the vital ecosystems and climatological systems of our world, we will provoke surprising "emergences, many of which will probably not be to our liking !!

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