Ebook: Gaia, A way of knowing: Political implications of the new biology

A NEW BIOLOGY and a new philosophy of life and living organisms are emerging from international scientific work currently being done in many different fields. Flowing out of the epistemological work of the late Gregory Bateson and others in bringing together biology and information theory is what could be called the Santiago school of cognitive biology, expressed in the work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and the Parisian school of self-organizing systems biology, represented here by Henri Atlan. A quite different approach has been taken by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, formulators of the Gaia Hypothesis as a model for planetary and cellular dynamics, but when all of these approaches are looked at together, as the cultural historian William Irwin Thompson does, what can be seen is the foundation of a startling new paradigm of wholeness: life as cognition, communication, knowing. In this collection of essays, Thompson has brought together these authors with others—the New Age economist Hazel Henderson and ecologist John Todd—to present a picture of the new biology and its cultural implications, suggesting that, for the first time since Newton, we have the chance to create a new ecology of consciousness, the basis for a new political and economic order which, because it arises out of the study of life, is life-enhancing and life-embracing.