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Sunday, May 25, 2003
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Peter Corning writes: Thirty years ago, Arthur Koestler wrote, "True innovation occurs when things are put together for the first time that had been separate." I believe the famed novelist and respected polymath was seeking to draw our attention to a phenomenon that is greatly underrated and vastly more important even than Koestler imagined. I call it nature’s magic. Grand theories are commonplace these days. It seems that new ideas must shout to be heard. So the claims for this book may sound like hyperbole as usual. The thesis, in brief, is that synergy -- a vaguely familiar term to many of us -- is actually one of the great governing principles of the natural world. It has been a wellspring of creativity in the evolution of the universe, and it has greatly influenced the overall trajectory of life on earth. It has played a decisive role in the emergence of humankind. It is vital to the workings of every modern society. And it is no exaggeration to say that our ultimate fate depends upon it. All this may sound like so much dust-jacket rhetoric, but the "Synergism Hypothesis" (as I call it) is a serious scientific theory that is fully consistent with Darwin's theory, and with the canons of the physical, biological and social sciences, not to mention the new science of complexity. The theory, in a nutshell, is that synergy is not only a ubiquitous effect in nature; it has also played a key causal role in the evolutionary process. It has been at once the fountainhead and the raison d’etre for the progressive increase in complexity over the broad span of evolutionary history. Far from being law-like and predictable, however, this trend has always involved an open-ended, creative, historically-constrained experiment in which economic criteria (broadly defined) have predominated. Complexity – in nature and human societies alike -- is not the product of some inexorable force, or mechanism, or “law”. It has been shaped by the immediate functional advantages -- the “payoffs” -- arising from various forms of synergy. (05/25/03) | |
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Bill Moyers writes: I was just ten years old when the allies landed on Normandy on June 6, 1944. I couldn't then imagine what it must have been like on those beaches when our world was up for grabs and men spilled their blood and guts to save it. I never knew what it was like until fifteen years ago when I accompanied some veterans from Texas who had fought at Normandy and survived, and were now returning to retrace their steps. Jose Lopez was one of the veterans that joined me on that journey. Lopez said of his experiences as a soldier, "I was really very, very afraid. That I want to scream. I want to cry and we see other people was laying wounded and screaming and everything and it's nothing you could do. We could see them groaning in the water and we keep walkin'." Jose Lopez went on to win the Congressional Medal of Honor, our nation's highest honor for gallantry in action. But searching for the place he landed that day, he didn't want to talk about the Medal of Honor. He just wanted to be alone with his memories. Howard Randall took a bullet in his ankle and almost had his leg amputated. His buddy Ed wasn't so lucky. (Edward J. Myers, First Lieutenant, fought in the 17th Infantry, 76th Division.) Randall spoke of his friend Ed during our trip, "He's from the State of Washington, Puyallup, Washington. March 1, 1945. That was the same day I was wounded. He was behind me probably a hundred yards, maybe 200 yards. And he caught a piece of mortar fragment in the stomach, lived until that night. I didn't know he'd died until a couple of days later." Every Memorial Day I think about what these men did and what we owe them. They didn't go through hell so Kenny Boy Lay could betray his investors and workers at Enron, or for a political system built on legal bribery. It wasn't for corporate tax havens in Bermuda, or an economic system driven by the law of the jungle, or so a handful of media buccaneers could turn the public airwaves into private sewers. (05/25/03) | |
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New Scientist -- Hundreds of extra scientists are being sought to work on Britain's nuclear bomb programme. Their job will be to maintain Britain¹s Trident warheads, to help ensure that new weapons can be designed in the future and to conduct joint research with the US. But the recruitment drive has raised fears that Britain risks being sucked into fresh US research on low-yield nuclear weapons so-called "mini-nukes" for use as bunker busters on the battlefield. Britain "is being dragged down the slippery slope towards new nuclear weapons and nuclear testing by the US," says Kathryn Crandall, an analyst with the British American Security Information Council, an independent think tank in Washington DC. A spokesman for Britain's Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) at Aldermaston, Berkshire, confirmed to New Scientist that it is planning to increase its workforce from 3500 to 3800 "or even higher" by 2008. It hopes to hire up to 80 physicists, materials scientists and systems engineers in 2003 alone. (05/25/03) | |
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New York Times: Book Reviews -- The ghosts of vanquished animals still haunt their former habitats; jungles without tigers, prairies without buffaloes and savannas where herds of elephants once foraged all remind us of what has vanished. But maritime extinctions, as Richard Ellis so eloquently reminds us in ''The Empty Ocean,'' are largely invisible, leaving us, ''stranded on shore, watching as the bountiful sea life disappears before our uncomprehending eyes.'' And so Florida mangroves cleared for condominiums are an ecological slap in the face, but a reef off the Florida Keys bleached by the effluvia of legal septic tanks and illegal cesspools looks no different from the shoreline; waves continue breaking gently across it, and its shallows are still the same beautiful turquoise. Walk along a resort beach in Baja California and you would never guess that offshore, in areas where a half-century earlier divers found 4,000 abalones per acre, they can now find only one per acre. Stand on a rocky promontory on one of Norway's Lofoten Islands and the black North Sea waters below look as chilly and forbidding as they have for centuries; unless you had read Ellis's book, you would have no way of knowing that a century earlier they supported shoals of fish teeming in 130-foot-high underwater columns, a miracle known as a ''cod mountain.'' Sometimes the dying occurs within sight, at the water's edge, and hints at the wider devastation beyond. Residents of high-rise condominiums on Florida's Atlantic shoreline sometimes trip over dead or dying female sea turtles while taking morning walks. The creatures have crawled ashore at night to lay their eggs and, mistaking the lighted condominiums for the sun rising over the Atlantic, then head inland, become stranded and die. Visitors to remote Enderby Island could not fail to notice the rabbits, introduced by French settlers in the 19th century and numbering in the thousands. They would notice, too, in some of the rabbits' deep burrows, the carcasses of sea lion pups, 700 of which every year wriggle into these burrows, become trapped and die. ... (05/25/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- New Jersey, far more densely populated than any other state — more crowded than Japan or India, for that matter — is on course for another distinction: it will be the first state, land-use experts say, to exhaust its supply of land available for development. The prospect of running out of open space to build on, a phenomenon that planners call buildout, is at the heart of Gov. James E. McGreevey's well-publicized campaign against sprawl. In poll after poll, voters in this most suburban of states say they hate what they see, and elected officials on all levels have taken note. Roughly two million of New Jersey's five million acres are developed, and a little over one million are protected by various levels of government. The state has promised to acquire or preserve enough land, including farmland, to bring the number of protected acres to two million by 2009. Some of the rest is unsuitable for development, leaving less than a million acres to be fought over. Since those estimates were made a few years ago, some of those acres have surely been developed. The pace of suburban development is a powerful issue in many other states after a 10-year onslaught of building, but the political and economic tensions are especially raw here, where more people are scrambling over less open space. Builders accuse the governor of thwarting the American dream, environmentalists say builders will kill agriculture, and many towns try to avoid the costs of growth, like developing infrastructure and building schools, by zoning out housing that would bring in children. (05/25/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- The House voted today to give the Pentagon broad discretion to waive laws meant to protect rare animal and plant species if the restrictions are judged to interfere with military training and readiness. ... House members voted, 252 to 175, to allow the Pentagon to override the environmental laws. Representative Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said that the laws were making it increasingly difficult for the military to find training grounds and that long stretches of 17 miles of beach at Camp Pendleton, Calif., could not be used for Marine landing exercises because of lawsuits, the presence of an endangered gnatcatcher and protected vegetation. "Those training grounds are becoming more and more constricted and more off limits to our troops," Mr. Hunter said. ... The House scaled back the plan from its initial version, one that would have extended the waiver to every federal agency, when it became clear such a sweeping exemption could not pass, senior Republican aides said. But conservation groups said the measure could still apply to more than 25 million acres controlled by the Pentagon that are home to hundreds of endangered and threatened species. (05/25/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- The federal Environmental Protection Agency approved regulations gradually introducing over 14 years steps to reduce the vast quantities of garbage that flow into storm drains and rivers around Los Angeles, ultimately emptying into the ocean. It fouls beaches, threatens human health and damages marine life. "The basic good news is the court upheld a plan that will make dramatic improvements in the water quality in the Los Angeles area and will solve over time an epidemic of trash in local creeks, rivers and at the beach," said David Beckman, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Los Angeles. Mr. Beckman noted that while littering was illegal in every community in Southern California, as much as 3,000 tons of trash made its way to area beaches in a given year. The rules were adopted as part of a consent decree after environmental groups sued the environmental agency for the failure to establish standards to regulate the level of pollutants flowing into local waters. The agency assumed the responsibility for the regulations when the state failed to do so. (05/25/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- Christie Whitman's resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency leaves the environment without a single reliable defender inside the Bush administration. Even Mrs. Whitman's voice had grown less constant and increasingly faint. She arrived in Washington with respectable credentials as a defender of the regulatory framework that for 30 years had brought the nation cleaner air and water. But she soon found herself overwhelmed by the lobbyists and ideologues President Bush installed in every other important environmental job, and by a White House that valued its corporate constituency far more than it cared for the environment. (05/25/03) | |
7:33:00 AM 
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
6/3/2003; 5:44:59 AM.
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