Here is the web page: GLOBAL INSANITY: HOW HOMO SAPIENS LOST TOUCH WITH REALITY WHILE TRANSFORMING THE WORLD. Here is the jacket summary:
The Global Economy that sustains the civilized world is destroying the biosphere. As a result, civilization, like the Titanic, it is on a collision course with disaster. But changing course via the body politic appears to be well nigh impossible, given that much of the populace lives in denial. Why is that? And how did we get into such a fix?
In this essay, biologists James Coffman and Donald Mikulecky argue that the reductionist model of the world developed by Western civilization misrepresents life, undermining our ability to regulate and adapt to the accelerating anthropogenic transformation of the world entrained by that very model. An alternative worldview is presented that better accounts for both the relational nature of living systems and the developmental phenomenology that constrains their evolution. Development of any complex system reinforces specific dependencies while eliminating alternatives, reducing the diversity that affords adaptive degrees of freedom: the more developed a system is, the less potential it has to change its way of being. Hence, in the evolution of life most species become extinct.
This perspective reveals the limits that complexity places on knowledge and technology, bringing to light our hubristically dysfunctional relationship with the world and increasingly tenuous connection to reality. The inescapable conclusion is that, barring a cultural metamorphosis that breaks free of deeply entrenched mental frames that made us what we are, continued development of the Global Economy will lead inexorably to the collapse of civilization.
Some more below the break.
An overview of the proposed book: “GLOBAL INSANITY: How Homo sapiens Lost Touch with Reality while Transforming the World”
About the authors: James A. Coffman is an Associate Professor at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Maine.and Donald C. Mikulecky is a Senior Fellow in the Virginia commonwealth University Center for the Study of Biological Complexity. He earned a Ph D in Physiology in 1963 at the University of Chicago and then did postdoctoral training with the late Aaron (Katzir) Katchalsky in Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics and Membrane Biophysics at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. He is the author of the book The Application of Network Thermodynamics to Problems in Biomedical engineering and scores of refereed journal articles. In the last twenty or thirty years he has been exploring the complexity theory started by the late Robert Rosen who has published a number of seminal books in this new field.
A summary of the books content:
The Global Economy that sustains the civilized world is destroying the biosphere. Like the Titanic, it is on a collision course with disaster. But changing course via the body politic appears to be well nigh impossible, given that much of the populace lives in denial of reality. Why is that? And how did we get into such a fix? That question has two answers, one historical, the other phenomenological. First, Western science conceived nature as a machine, a legacy of the empiricism of Bacon, the dualism of Descartes, and the determinism of Newton. But that metaphor is fundamentally flawed, as Robert Rosen has rigorously demonstrated. Second, the Global Economy, like any complex system, developed into existence. Development is a growth- and feedback-driven trajectory of systemic change that reinforces specific dependencies while eliminating alternatives, reducing the diversity that affords degrees of freedom. The more developed a system is, the less potential it has to change its way of being. That is why, in the evolution of life, most species become extinct (overspecialization), and ecological collapse is a common occurrence. But we humans have taken it to a new level. On a global scale, we built an industrial “metabolism” based on nonrenewable high energy resources, which fueled our exponential growth and socioeconomic development. As a result, we are now deeply dependent on that system, and are forced to keep repairing it in order to survive. Unfortunately, not only does the system lack the resources it needs for long-term survival, it is based on the misconception that life is a mechanism, with its implicit assumption that technology has an unlimited capacity to fix all our problems. Now that we are trapped, people don't want to hear that those ideas are wrong, because that brings to light just how dire our predicament really is.
Contents
I. System earth in the Anthropocene....................................................................................2
II. Of metaphors, metaphysics, and math: a mythology of mechanisms...............................6
III. Robert Rosen’s insight into life itself – the Modeling Relation.................................. ....14
IV. The logic of development – reflexive reinforcement of dependency...............................24
V. Metabolism and repair in the Global Economy................................................................31
VI. Running on empty.............................................................................................................37
VII. What can be done?............................................................................................................45
What we do with this book is to make a decidedly new paradigm open to the reader in order that the reader can use it to evaluate the crisis we are in. The new paradigm counters the damage done to our world view through the complete adoption of Cartesian Reductionism, Cartesian mind/body duality and Cartesian machine metaphors for the entire natural world, in particular the living world.
We make the case that this world view has limited our ability to respond adequately to what we have done and are doing to the Earth System that sustains us. We will show that an alternative world view that is antithetical to reductionist thinking, that is has a holistic quality that recognizes the inter relationships in complex systems, can be adopted and used to understand where we are, how we got here, and give insight into where we might be going.
We also argue that the systems way of thinking is the key to understanding the self imposed and other limits to what we are able to do. What we have learned about the nature of self organizing complex systems will be applied to the Earth System as a whole and the role of the biosphere, the human component of the biosphere, the economy and technology of the human component and their nested self organizing character.
We build, in part on a recent paper by one of us [(2011). Even More Than Life Itself: Beyond Complexity. Axiomathes 21 (3):455-471. that frames the discussion in the context of a continuation of the “dialog” started by Robert Maynard Hutchins when he was President of the University of Chicago almost a century ago. In that paper a surrogate dialog is created between many modern authors all of whom have addressed one or more facets of these topics.
Our thesis leads to the firm conclusion that unless we break out of the world view that got us to where we are, solutions are really not available to us.
We have a well documented story here. I'll be happy to answer questions. Often times in life one comes to conclusions one desperately hopes are wrong. Clearly that is true here! I still believe that we do not need a weatherman to tell us which way the ill wind is blowing.