Evolving Systems
Welcome. This page provides a continually updated lists of links to materials created in connection with the Evolving Systems project. Feel free to browse and comment in the associated online forums. For more information about the project itself, please see the project home page and the overview.
The Baldwin Effect: Intentionality in Biological Evolution?
The Emergence of Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics
Evolving Systems:
Open Conversations
Organic Evolution (aka the "Baldwin Effect"): Intentionality in Evolution?
Greg Davis
19 November 2009
The Classification Problem: Implications for Intentionality
The Emergence of Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics
Evolving Systems:
Open Conversations
The Classification Problem: Implications for Intentionality
Wil Franklin
5 November 2009
(to be continued 12 November)
Evolving Systems: October 2009 Core Group Meeting
The Emergence of Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics
October 27, 2009 Core Group Meeting
Background, Summary,
and Continuing Discussion
The I Ching and the Emergence of Form
Background (Ben, excerpted from a longer .pdf):
Deep Time, Deep Space, Deep Play: Writing (to) the Future
Deep Time, Deep Space, Deep Play:
Writing (to) the Future
Anne Dalke, for the Open Conversations
on Evolving Systems
October 22, 2009
Introduction to Evolving Systems: Beyond Emergence to Agency
The Emergence of Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics
Evolving Systems:
Open Conversations
Introduction to Evolving Systems: Beyond Emergence to Agency
Paul Grobstein
8 October 2009
Reconceiving Inquiry: Againstness and Non-Foundationalism
Paul Grobstein
Evolving Systems Core Group
22 September 2009
Notes for session
(see here for background, session summary and continuing conversation)
"being" is an unstable state, it is provisional and experimental ... Mark Lord
Evolving Systems: September 2009 Core Group Meeting
The Emergence of Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics
September 22, 2009 Core Group Meeting
Background, Summary,
and Continuing Discussion
Working Without Mirrors, Glassy Essences, and Indubitability:
From the Subjective/Personal to the Objective/Inter-Personal and Back Again
Evolving Systems: August 2009 Core Group Meeting
The Emergence of Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics
August 18, 2009 Core Group Meeting
Background, Summary,
and Continuing Discussion
Background (Paul's version):
From homes and perches to the cosmos, and back again
Alice and Paul work together in several venues, including the Evolving Systems project and a manuscript in progress integrating biological and social perspectives on education. Over lunch one day, Alice offered that she (and other human beings?) appreciates, even needs, "perches" in addition to "homes" as resources for living the way she likes/hopes to live.
Evolving Systems and Education
Teaching Shamanism:
A Conversation About Education, the Unconscious and Stories,
Community Dynamics, and Life
The Taoist Story Teller and Culture: Do We Still Need Truth, Reality, and/or God?
The 2009 Metanexus meeting, plane rides to/from Phoenix reading Raymond Smullyan's The Tao is Silent and Ann Harrington's The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine, conversations last week with Bharath Vallabha (see Truth and Power in Education), Alice Lesnick, and Ben Olshin, and discussions in our K-12 summer institutes all seem to bear on the above question(s), and suggest an interesting approach to them.
Relections on openness and structure in education
The following was written by Bharath Vallabha, following a session on emergent pedagogy in a summer session for K-12 teachers in which Bharath participated. It is relevant a well to current discussions of the Evolving Systems group about its own organization and, more generally, to issues of human community organization generally.
Here are three aims for a classroom:
Evolving Systems: July 2009 Core Group Meeting
The Emergence of Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics
July 7, 2009 Core Group Meeting
Background, Summary,
and Continuing Discussion
Background (Paul's version):
Evolving Systems Starting Points: Beckmann
Peter Beckmann
Starting Points re Evolving Systems and Emergence
27 June 2009
Evolving inquiry: the unconscious as bridging the intellectual/spiritual and the academic/personal
Interesting conversation with Bharath last week, one based on a shared interest in the "unconscious view of thinking" and exploring some of its implications with regard to the relation between the professional and the personal, the "intellectual" and the "spiritual."
Transdisciplinary Meeting Proposal
I very much appreciate and am excited about the possibility of trans-disciplinary conversations. In my experience I have found though that good intentions on all sides are not sufficient in order for such a conversation to fruitfully take place. In what follows I would like to do three things:
1) describe the situation (what it seems to me normally happens in the attempt at trans-disciplinary conversations)
2) diagnose the situation (the reasons why the situation plays out in the way it does), and
Starting from "what happened here before"....
Gary Snyder begins a poem called “What Happened Here Before”:
— 300,000,000—
First a sea: soft sands, muds, and marls
— loading, compressing, heating, crumpling,
crushing, recrystallizing, infiltrating,
several times lifted and submerged,
intruding molten granite magma
deep-cooled and speckling,
gold quartz fills the cracks…
(and continues, quite a few stanzas later…)
—40,000—
And human people came with basket hats and nets
winter-houses and underground
yew bows painted green,
feasts and dances for the boys and girls
