Organisms Participate Actively in Their Own Evolution

Discussion

Robert Parker:

(context, an introduction to the Philosophy of the Implicit as proposed by Gene Gendlin)

"Changing the materialistic world-view: Materialistic science pervades our thinking, with negative effects. Gendlin's philosophy challenges this at all levels. For example, in A Process Model, Gendlin criticized the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution by showing that life could not have evolved only passively and mechanistically, and he predicted that other specific processes must be involved. When the first edition of A Process Model came out in 1981, Gendlin's claim seemed outrageous. Today, Gendlin's view is beginning to receive empirical support as researchers discover that under stressful conditions, organisms appear to participate actively in their own evolution (e.g., Ben-Jacob, E., 1998; Lolle et al., 2005)." (http://www.lifeforward.org/id2.html?)

More information

Ben-Jacob, E. (1998). Bacterial wisdom, Godel's theorem and creative genomic webs. Physica A 248, 57-76.

Ben-Jacob, E., Aharonov, Y., & Shapira, Y. (2004). Bacteria harnessing complexity. Biofilms 1, 239–263 (doi:10.1017/S1479050505001596)

Ben-Jacob, E., & Levine, H. (2005). Self-engineering capabilities of bacteria. J. R. Soc. Interface (doi:10.1098/rsif.2005.0089) Published online

Ben-Jacob, E., & Shapira, Y. (in press). Meaning-based natural intelligence vs. information-based artificial intelligence. In Cradle of Creativity (2005).

Ben-Jacob, E., Shapira, Y., & Tauber, A. I. (2006). Seeking the foundations of cognition in bacteria: From Schrödinger's Negative Entropy to Latent Information. Physica A vol 359 ; 495-524.