Becoming Human

Where did we come from? What makes us human? An explosion of recent discoveries sheds light on these questions, and NOVA's three-part T.V special, Becoming Human, examines what the latest scientific research reveals about our hominid relatives.

Becoming Human Part 1
First Steps: 6 million years ago, what set our ancestors on the path from ape to human? Tuesday, November 3 at 8 pm (Check local listings)

Becoming Human Part 2
Birth of Humanity: New discoveries reveal how early humans hunted and formed families. Tuesday, November 10 at 8 pm (Check local listings)

Becoming Human Part 3
Last Human Standing: Many human species once shared the globe. Why do we alone remain? Tuesday, November 17 at 8 pm (Check local listings)

Learn More: Here

The Climate for International Solidarity

From the United Nations:

Impacts of Climate Change Coming Faster and Sooner: New Science Report Underlines Urgency for Governments to Seal the Deal in Copenhagen

September 24, 2009 -The pace and scale of climate change may now be outstripping even the most sobering predictions of the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC).

An analysis of the very latest, peer-reviewed science indicates that many predictions at the upper end of the IPCC's forecasts are becoming ever more likely.

Meanwhile, the newly emerging science points to some events thought likely to occur in longer-term time horizons, as already happening or set to happen far sooner than had previously been thought.

Researchers have become increasingly concerned about ocean acidification linked with the absorption of carbon dioxide in seawater and the impact on shellfish and coral reefs.

Water that can corrode a shell-making substance called aragonite is already welling up along the California coast?decades earlier than existing models predict. Losses from glaciers, ice-sheets and the Polar Regions appear to be happening faster than anticipated, with the Greenland ice sheet, for example, recently seeing melting some 60 percent higher than the previous record of 1998.

Some scientists are now warning that sea levels could rise by up to two metres by 2100 and five to ten times that over following centuries.

There is also growing concern among some scientists that thresholds or tipping points may now be reached in a matter of years or a few decades including dramatic changes to the Indian sub-continent's monsoon, the Sahara and West Africa monsoons, and climate systems affecting a critical ecosystem like the Amazon rainforest.

The report also underlines concern by scientists that the planet is now committed to some damaging and irreversible impacts as a result of the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere.

Read More: Here

God, Approximately

God, Approximately

By Brian Cantwell Smith

Consider the rise of the religious right: Muslim and Hindu fundamentalism, right-wing Zionism, the Christian moral majority. These movements are responding to—and exploiting—a widespread social hunger: a sense that reigning secular, scientific, and capitalist world views don’t supply what matters: ways to tell right from wrong, guidance to anchor individual lives and give them meaning, the wherewithal to resolve ethical dilemmas.

I find many of the fundamentalists’ answers appalling: bigoted, meanspirited, scary. But what are those of us on the left—we scientists, we intellectuals, we in the academy—doing about this heartfelt lack? If we don’t recognize (and respond to) the yearning—if, willfully or unwittingly, we remain blind to the hunger—then we have no leg to stand on, in criticising others' replies.

What we need are better answers: frameworks to stir compassion, give meaning to lives, combat prejudice, secure a modicum of economic wellbeing, preserve the planet. These frameworks must be global; it is too late for parochial sectarianism. And they must build on the best in science. We need to move forwards, not back.

Read More (PDF): Here

From Pre-rational to Meta-rational?

Cognitive Levels of Evolution: From Pre-rational to Meta-rational

By Francis Heylighen

The principle of natural selection is taken as a starting point for an analysis of evolutionary levels. Knowledge and values are conceived as vicarious selectors of actions from a repertoire. The concept of metasystem transition is derived from the law of requisite variety and the principle of hierarchy. It is defined as the increase of variety at the object level, accompanied by the emergence of a situation-dependent control at a metalevel. It produces a new level of evolution, with a much higher capacity for adaptation.

The most important levels are discussed, with an emphasis on the level characterizing man as distinct from the animals. An analysis of the shortcomings of this "rational" system of cognition leads to a first sketch of how the next higher "meta-rational" level would look like.

Read More: Here

New Theses on Integral Micropolitics

Daniel Gustav Anderson is a cultural critic and integral theorist currently teaching literature and cultural history in Washington D.C.

Anderson has called for the development of a "critical Integral theory," which he conceives as a theory capable of doing Integral work while holding up to a rigorous ideological analysis. He has mapped this position in his essay, "Of Syntheses and Surprises: Toward a Critical Integral Theory".

His work is heavily influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Zizek, Ziporyn, and Tarthang Tulku among others. He has expressed the view that the aim of a critical integral theory must be radical democracy, on the hypothesis that enlightenment experiences and social revolution share a similar organizational pattern.

Below, in an outstanding new essay, Daniel further develops his project and provides resources towards a more critical and integrative social theory. Enjoy:

“Such a Body We Must Create”: New Theses on Integral Micropolitics

By Daniel Gustav Anderson

This essay proposes a rigorously postmetaphysical integral praxis, defines what this means and how such an intervention may be premised, and demonstrates throughout some methodological and practical advantages this approach may have over extant metaphysically-oriented integral theories.

Beginning with an interpretation of post-Hegelian historical and dialectical materialisms informed by the Buddhist dialectical tradition of Madhyamika, a series of coordinated and interrelated theses address problems proper to fields such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, semiotics, historiography, and subaltern studies.

The claimed purpose of this project is to coordinate subjective (psychological, spiritual) and objective (social, political, economic) transformational imperatives into a coherent, non-ontological “counterproject.” It takes as its aim the production of a radically democratized, responsible, and sane subjective and objective space, where responsibility is characterized as critical clarity, competence, creative consciousness, and compassion.

Read More (PDF): Here

See Also: An Interview with Daniel Gustav Anderson

Love and Integral Evolution

Integral Evolution: An Interview with David Loye

By Russ Volckmann

David Loye is one of those people that the longer you get to know them the more you begin to discover a bit of their depth and breadth of perspective and creativity in the world. His publications speak for themselves. His network with leading scientists and thinkers around the world is equally impressive.

Actually, my first contact was with David’s wife, Riane Eisler, author of the Chalice and the Blade (among other books written with and without David). Despite the fact that they live over the hill from me, I did not meet her face to face right away. Rather, I interviewed her over the telephone for the Integral Leadership Review, which I publish and edit. When I first approached her about doing the interview she suggested that I should interview David, but I did not know David Loye’s work at all. In that interview I discovered more about Riane’s work and the extent of their partnership. In fact, they are prime movers of a partnership approach to leadership that they promote through a nonprofit center and in a Master’s program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

My conversation with Riane piqued my curiosity about David’s work and I bought one of his books, Darwin’s Lost Theory of Love. Here I found evidence of the extraordinary scope and depth of David’s work that made him a natural candidate for an interview. The only question was would I use it in Integral Leadership Review or in Integral Review: such is the quality of his interests and intellect.

Read the Entire Interview: Here

DAVID LOYE is a psychologist, evolutionary systems scientist, World War II veteran and the author of many books on Darwin, moral evolution, evolution theory, history, poetry, love and social action. David is also co-founder of the multinational General Evolution Research Group and World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution.

DeLanda on Deleuze

Deleuze and the Open-ended Becoming of the World

by Manuel DeLanda

With the final mathematization of classical physics in the nineteenth century, a certain picture of the world emerged dominant, one in which clockwork determinism reigned supreme and time played no creative role, so that the future was effectively closed, completely given in the past. Although the set of equations with which Hamilton was able to unify all the different fields of classical physics (mechanics, optics, and the elementary theory of electromagnetism) did contain a variable for time, this variable played only an extrinsic role: once the equations were defined for a specific instant, both the past and the future were completely determined, and could be obtained mechanically by simply integrating the equations.

To be sure, this static, timeless picture of reality did not go unchallenged within science, since thermodynamics had already introduced an arrow of time which conflicted with the symmetric conception of classical mechanics, where the past and the future were interchangeable. Nevertheless, as the history of statistical mechanics makes it clear, much scientific effort has been spent in our century to reconcile time asymmetry at the level of large aggregates with the still accepted time symmetry at the level of individual interactions.

Thus, it would become the task of philosophers and social scientists to attempt to reconceptualize the world in order to give time and history a creative role, with the vision of an open future that this implies. Although there have been a variety of strategies to achieve this open future, here I would like to concentrate on two contrasting approaches. The first is perhaps best illustrated by the intellectual movement that is today known as "social constructivism", but which roots lie in linguistic and anthropological theories which go back to the turn of the century.

At the risk of oversimplifying, we may say that the core of this approach is a neo-Kantian theory of perception, in which individual experience is completely structured by the interplay of concepts and representations, but one in which Kant's transcendental concepts (of space and time) have been replaced by the conventional concepts of a given culture. The guiding image of this strategy may be said to be "each culture lives in its own world", an image central to many theoretical approaches in this century, from the cultural relativism of Margaret Mead and Franz Boas, to the linguistic relativism of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Worf, to the epistemological relativism of Thomas Khun's theory of scientific paradigms. Again, oversimplifying somewhat, the key idea in all these theories is one of "incommensurability" across worlds, each conceptual scheme constructing its own reality so that bridges between worlds are hard, if not impossible, to build.

More: Here

WorldChanging Team

From WorldChanging Team:

Crackdown against 'environmental criminals' follows Greenpeace report

Slaughtering the Amazon from Greenpeace UK on Vimeo.

Some of the world's top footwear brands, including Clarks, Adidas, Nike and Timberland, have demanded an immediate moratorium on destruction of the Amazon rainforest from their leather suppliers in Brazil.

The move is the first major development since the Guardian revealed a three-year undercover investigation by Greenpeace in June. The investigation said leading Brazilian suppliers of leather and beef for products sold in Britain had obtained cattle from farms involved in illegal deforestation.

Intersubjectivity and Interobjectivity in the Kosmos

The Ways We Are in This Together: Intersubjectivity and Interobjectivity in the Holonic Kosmos

by Ken Wilber

In "An Integral Age at the Leading Edge", we summarized the evidence suggesting that a cultural elite, representing less that 2% of the adult population, was entering psychosocial waves of development that could best be described as integral, and that this 2% might very well be the harbinger of integral waves of consciousness to follow in the culture at large. It is a paradoxical situation, in a sense, in that this "elite" is the first to actually embrace a radical inclusiveness, an inclusive not shared by the other 98% of the population at this time (although they, too, might develop into this inclusive and integral orientation). But the integral waves of consciousness, however conceived, have at least one thing in common: an understanding that "Everybody is right."

This means that the chief activity of integral cognition is not looking at all of the available theories--whether premodern, modern, or postmodern--and then asking, "Which one of those is the most accurate or acceptable?," but rather consists in asking, "How can all of those be right?" The fact is, all of the various theories, practices, and established paradigms--in the sciences, arts, and humanities--are already being practiced: they are already arising in a Kosmos that clearly allows them to arise, and the question is not, which of those is the correct one, but what is the structure of the Kosmos such that it allows all of those to arise in the first place? What is the architecture of a universe that includes so many wonderful rooms?

One such suggested architecture of the Kosmos is called AQAL (pronounced "ah-qwil," short for "all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types..."). The pragmatic correlate of AQAL metatheory is a set of practices (or meta-paradigms) referred to as Integral Methodological Pluralism, which attempts to honor and include the many important modes of human inquiry already arising in this spacious Kosmos.

We particularly focused on the quadratic aspects of this methodological pluralism, where "quadratic" refers to four of the most basic dimensions of being-in-the-world, dimensions that are so fundamental they have become embedded in natural languages as variations on first-, second-, and third-person pronouns (which can be summarized as "I," "we," "it," and "its"). As we saw, these represent the inside and outside of the singular and the plural: hence, the four quadrants ( subjective or "I," objective or "it," intersubjective or "we," and interobjective or "its"). A few aspects of these four dimensions are indicated in figure 1.

We also saw that human beings, over the decades and sometimes centuries, have developed time-honored methods of inquiry that enact, bring forth, and illumine these basic dimensions of being-in-the-world. For example, phenomenology and introspection enact, bring forth, and illumine the first-person singular dimensions of being-in-the-world ("I" or subjectivity, the UL quadrant); hermeneutics and collaborative inquiry enact, bring forth, and illumine the first- and second-person plural dimensions of being-in-the-world ("thou/we" or intersubjectivity, the LL quadrant); empiricism and behaviorism enact, bring forth, and illumine the third-person singular dimensions of being-in-the-world ("it" or objectivity, the UR quadrant); and ecology, functionalism, and systems theory enact, bring forth, and illumine the third-person plural dimensions of being-in-the-world ("its" or interobjectivity, the LR quadrant). Of course, there are many other important modes of inquiry, but those are a few of the historically most significant, and certainly ones that any integral methodological pluralism would want to address.

Read More: Here

NOTE: This is Excerpt C of draft material Wilber released a number of years ago. For more such excerpts go to Wilber's Shambala website.

Toward an Integral Media Criticism

Toward an Integral Media Criticism

by Rebecca Bailin

When did I walk away from away from that doctoral program? 1981? I was three courses and a dissertation away from a UCLA PhD in Theory, History and Criticism of film and TV. A doctoral dissertation away, however, can not be considered close. A friend likened writing a dissertation to having a low grade fever for several years. You’re never really sick enough to just lie in bed but you don’t feel very good, either.

Looking back through an integral lens, it is precisely the “flatlandedness” of my classically postmodern education that did me in. If I had to write one more paper about a film or TV show that may have looked fun/happy/liberating/progressive on the surface but was really repressive de-sublimation that erased capitalist and patriarchal hegemony, I was going to puke. Buddhists are accused of not being much of a party crowd, but try postmodernists.

Postmodernist film criticism includes some real grostequeries: those French could write without irony about Jerry Lewis as a transgressive and liberating figure. And one school of “feminist” analysis was organized around Jacques Lacan’s Freudian work on “presence and absence” or penis vs. not-penis. I would come to my graduate seminars and whine, “are we going to do weenie-ology again today? Apologies to all the Freudians out there and shout-outs and props to our dawg Sig for his groundbreaking genius, but Freudian feminism still seems to me a little like a civil rights march led by Strom Thurmond.

What postmodernism did give us, of course, was an appreciation of the power and subtleties of the Lower Left; that culture and language and signs and meanings – our intersubjectivity – pervades our consciousness. We learned that we must consciously intend to make this pervasive ideology (and this was my favorite concept from postmodernism) “opaque.” Social meaning making is so complete that it is transparent – we don’t even perceive it unless we make an effort to make it opaque. Our Lower Left frames the questions we ask and thus shapes the answers that seem possible.

Read More: Here

Integral Ecology and Forest Innovation in British Columbia

Humanity, Forest Ecology, and the Future in a British Columbia Valley: A Case Study

by Stephan Martineau.

“One of the most important and challenging issues facing humanity in the 21st century is the increasingly complex human-ecology interface”, says Stephan Martineau.

In this article, Stephan suggests the potential that integral mediation and integral ecology hold in addressing this interface. Stephan distinguishes two categories of ecological challenges, removed and local tangible, and indicates that they require adapting methodologies to address them. Using a local tangible challenge—a 35-year old conflict over land use issues in the Slocan Valley, British Columbia, Canada—as an example, Stephan outlines an integral mediation approach.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE: HERE / OR AT: THE INTEGRAL REVIEW

Evolution's Third Replicator

From New Scientist:

Evolution's Third Replicator: Genes, Memes, and Now What?

by Susan Blackmore

WE HUMANS have let loose something extraordinary on our planet - a third replicator - the consequences of which are unpredictable and possibly dangerous.

What do I mean by "third replicator"? The first replicator was the gene - the basis of biological evolution. The second was memes - the basis of cultural evolution. I believe that what we are now seeing, in a vast technological explosion, is the birth of a third evolutionary process. We are Earth's Pandoran species, yet we are blissfully oblivious to what we have let out of the box.

This might sound apocalyptic, but it is how the world looks when we realise that Darwin's principle of evolution by natural selection need not apply just to biology. Given some kind of copying machinery that makes lots of slightly different copies of the same information, and given that only a few of those copies survive to be copied again, an evolutionary process must occur and design will appear out of destruction. You might call it "design by death" since clever designs thrive because of the many failures that don't.

The information that is copied, varied and selected is called the replicator, and the process is well understood when applied to biology. Genes are copied, mutated and selected over and over again. Assemblages of genes are used to build vehicles that carry them around, protect them and propagate them. These vehicles - the lumbering robots, as Richard Dawkins calls them - are animals and plants, the prolific and exquisitely designed products of the first replicator.

About 4 billion years after the appearance of the first replicator, something extraordinary happened. Members of one species of lumbering robot began to imitate one another. Imitation is a kind of copying, and so a new evolutionary process was born. Instead of cellular chemistry copying the order of bases on DNA, a sociable species of bipedal ape began to use its big brain to copy gestures, sounds and other behaviours. This copying might not have been very accurate, but it was enough to start a new evolutionary process. Dawkins called the new replicators "memes". A living creature, once just a vehicle of the first replicator, was now the copying machinery for the next.

Read More: Here

Meaning, Technology and the Brain

Below information designer Tom Wujec talks for just over six minutes about three areas of the brain that help us understand words, images, feelings, connections. Wujec asks: How can we best engage our brains to help us better understand big ideas?

God, Strings, Emergence and the Future

God, Strings, Emergence, and the Future of the World

By Nicola Hoggard Creegan

This paper is a part of a larger project in which I argue that a reconnection with nature, and a reconceptualization of nature, are necessary accompaniments to a well developed sensus divinitatis. Schleiermacher talks about faith being neither a knowing nor a doing but a kind of feeling, a sense of absolute dependence, and a consequent understanding of all things in and through the infinite. Calvin mentions the sensus divinitatis directly, and also the connection between this sense and the natural world. Like any capacity, however, it may remain undeveloped or under-developed. The sensus divinitatis may be awakened by connection with, and participation in the natural world—as centuries of mystics testify—although this connection is then explained by and made meaningful in sacred narratives.

The twentieth century has not been an easy time for a theology of nature. This was the century of Karl Barth and a turn away from nature in the interests of affirming the otherness and holiness of God. At the same time, neo-Darwinians taught us to look at all order as only design-like (spandrels). The indeterminacy of the quantum level, combined with the random nature of biological mutation, made any sense of divine presence in nature much more difficult to discern.

The resulting mix of positions in science and theology tended to gravitate either towards a deism, like that espoused by the 2006 recipient of the Templeton Prize, John Barrow, or to the process-like position of many others, like Ian Barbour. Even with the latter, however, there is little sense that God is revealed in nature; in a process theology of nature there is only the presence and influence of God understood as a continuous but perhaps indiscernible lure.

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Experiments in Second Tier Community

From Pacific Integral:

Collective Individualism: Experiments in Second Tier Community

by Terri O'Fallon, Venita Ramirez, Jesse McKay and Kari Mays

This paper describes an ongoing experiment in fostering development through an integrally informed educational program, called Generating Transformative Change in Human Systems (GTC). This program forms the structure for second-tier communities whose aim is to liberate greater service in the world, while holding the ongoing development of participants, facilitators, and the systems to which they are related.

In this presentation we will provide an introduction to the history and characteristics of the GTC program, present initial research findings of its impact and suggest questions for further research. Since the initial results of our research with the Leadership Development Framework (LDF) shows developmental shifts in program participants that exceeded our expectations, we offer suggestions for further research that explore the reasons for the implied impact the program is having on its participants’ development.

Read More: Here

SDi and the Palestine-Israel Conflict

From Integral Life:

Eleanor Roosevelt once said that "poor minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, and great minds discuss ideas." Integral minds, we might add, discuss all three. In the Integral Profiles series, host Jeff Salzman sits down with some of today's most notable thinkers, teachers, and leaders, discussing the many ways they are catalyzing the Integral vision in their lives, in their hearts, and in their work. These men and women are collectively defining the leading edge of evolution in today's world, their thoughts and actions actively influencing the shape and scope of tomorrow's possibilities.

Don Edward Beck, Ph.D., is Co-founder of The National Values Center in Denton, Texas, and President and CEO of The Spiral Dynamics Group, Inc. Beck co-authored The Crucible: Forging South Africa's Future (with Graham Linscott, l991) and Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership & Change (with Christopher Cowan, l996). He also writes a "Sports Values" column for the Dallas Morning News and appears often in the media regarding issues related to values, sports, and racial divides.

Here Don offers an intimate glimpse into his own life and career. He discusses the current phase of his work: traveling the world and applying Spiral Dynamics to various geo-political "hotspots" all over the planet. He offers his own ideas about healthy models of society, the crucial distinction between stages of consciousness and the contents of those stages, and the importance of preserving many of the early stages of development that are so often seen as primitive and obsolete. He then goes into considerable depth around the specifics of the Palestine-Israel conflict, describing the needs and problems on both sides of the divide, his hands-on involvement with both nations, and the remarkable receptivity with which his work has been met. At a time when tensions in the Middle East can seem so hopelessly combustible, it is encouraging to see Integral seeds being planted in such surprisingly fertile soil, offering us all a much-needed exhale as we wait to see how evolution will continue playing itself out in this difficult region of the world.