Darwin's year in 2009 celebrates the 200th birthday of perhaps the most profound thinker of the modern era. It is also an appropriate time to explore the ramifications of the next stage in the Darwinian revolution.
The biological theory of evolution is undoubtedly the most powerful paradigm ever conceived by humans to explain their own existence. Since Darwin's epoch-making treatise, Origin of Species, published a hundred and fifty years ago in 1859, evolution has been centre-stage, universally recognised as the driving force in the emergence of all life, including modern humans, from the genesis of the first cells on this planet, almost 4 billion years ago.
However, despite its ubiquitous brilliance as the jewel in the crown of human intellectual achievement, the notion of Darwinian evolution has never been developed to its full potential. It remains instead largely constrained within its biological cradle, often limited in its everyday connotation to the lowest common denominator of 'survival of the fittest'.
The intention of this blog on the Future of Darwinism will be to explore and re-evaluate the future potential of the Darwinian model and to demonstrate that its current scope and application is only the tip of the intellectual iceberg.
By combining its formidable biological principles, including the immense field of genetics, with those of systems, network, quantum, complexity and information theory, it emerges as an incalculably deeper and richer model than previously contemplated.
The major thesis currently being explored in this blog as well as by a number of eminent researchers across the spectrum of the physical and social sciences, demonstrates that the evolutionary engine that drives biological development also drives all other dynamic adaptive processes at the physical, social, cognitive, economic, political and technological level and is in fact the major dynamic governing the Universe, past present and future.
It is further proposed to explore in future posts the social ramifications of recent developments in artificial intelligence and the computational power of the Internet, that mark the next crucial stage in human evolution; involving the inevitable symbiosis of vast computational intelligence with the power of the human mind.
These two 21st century conceptual goals - a universal all-encompassing Unified Theory of Evolution based on the original Darwinian model - coupled with the emancipation of human intelligence via the future Web, together provide a vastly more powerful paradigm for exploring the future of life and human potential.
The Future Darwinism blog therefore develops the foundations for extending Darwin's legacy of a Biological Theory of Evolution towards a verifiable Unified Theory of Evolution, ecompassing all processes of life and the universe.
It also summarises the author's original thesis published in 2006 - The Future of Life: Meta-Evolution- A Unified Theory of Evolution
available from Amazon.com and now updated in 2010 and soon to be available from Google Editions e-book store.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
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