Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0

In this course

Wallace was the co-originator of natural selection theory whose late-19th-century writings on cosmic evolution and humanity's position in the material universe anchored early debates about life's universality beyond Earth. The course readings use Wallace as a historical marker for when biologists first grappled with evolutionary frameworks at cosmic scales, situating him at the threshold between Darwinian terrestrial biology and the mid-20th-century emergence of astrobiology as an experimental science. His work appears here to trace how cybernetic and systems-thinking approaches to life eventually transformed speculative cosmic biology into research programs.

Mentioned in 1 reading

Steven J. Dick

Cosmic Evolution, from Cosmos and Culture

4

For the most part, biologists were also reluctant cosmic evolutionists even at the beginning of the 20th century. The British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, cofounder with Darwin of the theory of natural selection, wrote in 1903 that “[o…Similarly, Lawrence J. Henderson, a professor of biological chemistry at Harvard, wrote 10 years after Wallace, “[t]here is . . . one scientific conclusion which I wish to put forward as a positive statement and, I trust, fruitful outcome o…Thus, cosmic biological evolution first had the potential to become a research program in the early 1960s when its cognitive elements had developed enough to become experimental and observational sciences, and when the researchers in these …

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