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 …Finally, cosmic evolution integrates humans into the cosmos quite literally by teaching us that we are all “star stuff.” Once again, Harlow Shapley was an early proponent of this perspective. “Mankind is made of star stuff,” he wrote alread…11. L. J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment (New York: MacMillan Company, 1913), reprinted with an Introduction by Harvard biologist George Wald (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1970), p. 312. The complexity of Henderson’s ideas on the…
Eric Chaisson
scientist · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Eric Chaisson is an astrophysicist and complexity theorist known for developing the framework of "cosmic evolution," which traces the emergence of increasingly complex structures from the Big Bang through biological and cultural systems. In this course, his work appears to ground arguments about human embeddedness in universal physical laws and the continuity between cosmic, biological, and technological evolution—legitimizing the notion that intelligence and complexity are natural outcomes of universal processes rather than exceptional phenomena. His framework is being mobilized to collapse traditional boundaries between nature and culture, enabling a genealogy that connects entropy, self-organization, and the emergence of computational systems.
Mentioned in 1 reading
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.