The noosphere vision of pierre teilhard de chardin and Vladimir I. Vernadsky in the perspective of information and of world‐wide communication 1

The noosphere vision of the two great natural scientists and thinkers Teilhard de Chardin and V. 1. Vernadsky is presented critically. Their basic ideas are discussed from the viewpoint of present‐day insights in natural science and of the world‐wide information and communication technology. To date very little has become known about their mutual influence on each other. It is advocated that the development of a noosphere can be supported by the networking and globalization of information and communication techniques. The noosphere is a sphere of human mind and of work, but it must not be identified with the modern technological trend that is changing all sectors of our life. A reference is made to Teilhard de Chardin's warnings against individualism, nationalism and racism, as well as fascism and Stalinism as seductive erroneous developments. The fundamentally teleological vision of T. de Chardin is contrasted in this paper with the idea of creativity in nature and in man. Delimiting conditions, such as structure, information, and at the level of society, the free will of man who has become aware of himself—humanistic values, are considered. All of them operate to limit the number of possibilities for development that are derived from the creativity of nature and man. Thus, new possibilities for development emerge at a higher level. The utilization of technology must be really oriented to human beings among human beings. Only with a strong internal determination of the social processes by understanding the genuine existence of man as man will it be possible to master the ambivalence of the technological effects and to come closer towards a society with deepened human information and communication.

Klaus Fuchs‐Kittowski, born in 1934, is Professor of Informationprocessing. He was head of the Division of Systems Design and Automated Information Processing at the Department of Theory and Organization of Science of Humboldt University Berlin. He was associated with the research at the International Institute for Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. At present he works as Visiting Professor at the Department of Informatics of the University of Hamburg, and at the Beriin College of Technology and Economics he has a teaching assignment in Economy Informatics. He is also an associated member of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, U.S.A.

Peter Krüger, born in 1934, Dr. rer nat, Dipl. Mineraloge worked at the Bergakademie Freiberg/Sachsen from 1958 to 1961 and from 1961 to 1985 in the Central Geological Institute Berlin. From 1985 to 1992 he worked as historian of science at the Division of History of Science at the Department of Theory and Organization of Science of Humboldt University Berlin. His special fields are history of geology, Russian‐German scientific connections in the 19th and 20th century and unpublished studies of Marx about geology, mineralogy and agrochemistry.     

Quest for optimum human population per nation

The world is being saturated with population to a point where its life‐support systems may be in danger of losing their ability to maintain environmental stability. Thus, there is an urgent need for scientists and decision makers to develop working models in which information about the population, resource exhaustion, and pollution of each nation is contained. The criteria for determining optimum human population are reviewed, and a bionomic model that incorporates the complex web of economic and political systems within an ecological framework is presented to solve the problem of how large a population each nation should have.     

AN INTRODUCTION

Global civilization is undergoing great change. This process of rethinking and rebirth, driven by the bankruptcy of modern culture, will eventually recast every endeavor from business, education, and politics to health, spirituality, and science. Yet, although the reforms needed to make this transition are already being developed all over the world and in every field imaginable, its magnitude is invisible because the solutions that could save us are disjoint. Integral science creates a rigorous, yet commonsense framework capable of uniting Integral Civilization. The key to this synthesis lies in its more harmonious alignment of head, heart, and hands.     

EDUCATION,SOCIAL CREATIVITY,AND THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY

The evolution of society, the transcendence of existing social structures, and how society creates itself rests in a function of education. In this article the author examines education's work as that of social creativity. The need for pedagogies of “educate hope” and “imaginative possibilities” is explored. Social epistemology and social imaginary are discussed as dimensions of social creativity within the postmodern society. The aesthetic imperative in education is argued as important to developing the capacities and capabilities in youth to imagine alternative future possibilities of democratic society. The author concludes by examining the role of education in the evolution of society.     

Economic cooperation in western Asia

Any changing system both develops and evolves (individuates). The evolution of the biosphere must therefore be taken in context of the development of the earth, which appears to have followed typical developmental rules of dissipative structures. Two different perspectives are possible on dissipative structures—the classical externalist perspective, which views open systems as becoming progressively negentropic, and the newer, internalist perspective, which views them from within as becoming increasingly disorderly. A history of the universe can be traced, alternately stressing the one and the other perspective, which can form the basic structure of a modern, science‐based creation myth.     

Phenomenology and philosophy of science

This article examines human systemic condition and its evolved cultural organization from the perspective of information. The aim is to discuss general, tentative hypotheses on the nature and role of information in human systems. As a framework, the article considers information as the underlying parameter of growth on the general evolutionary trajectory. Information growth experienced an unprecedented increase at the appearance of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, which, as is well known, implies the trajectory's close relation to our species. This has led to the notion of post-organic evolutionary era in which humankind, through cultural evolutionary means, is in the process of supplanting biological determinants. Development, understood generally as victory over nature, has always been the measure by which our species has defined its success; humankind persists in faith in technical solutions to all problems.     

MULTIFUNCTIONAL,SELF-ORGANIZING BIOSPHERE LANDSCAPES AND THE FUTURE OF OUR TOTAL HUMAN ECOSYSTEM

Solar energy powered autopoietic (self-creating and regenerative) natural and cultural biosphere landscapes fulfill vital multiple functions for the sustainable future of organic life and its biological evolution and for human physical and mental health. At the present crucial Macroshift from the industrial to the post- industrial information age, their future and therefore also that of our Total Human Ecosystem, integrating humans and their total environment, is endangered by the exponential growth and waste products of urban-industrial technosphere landscapes and agro-industrial bio-technosphere landscapes.

This danger can be prevented only by the creation of new symbiotic relations between human society and nature with the help of mutual supportive, restorative cultural and economic cross-catalytic networks in our Total human Ecosystem. This should be part of an all—embracing sustainability revolution, driven by human consciousness and its responsibility to act as stewards rather than exploiters of the complex and harmonious web of life on this planet.     

STUDENT LABOR AND EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION

The evolution of teaching is examined in three stages: apprenticeship, classical schooling, and mass schooling. All three stages use different social technologies to operate. The mass schooling is analyzed from the point of view of economic anthropology developed by Karl Polanyi, as a non-market economic system. Mass schooling uses the forms of motivation found in archaic, tribal economies: students do their homework and attend school out of considerations of reciprocity. Schools must be treated differently with respect to their improvement. School improvement should be based on perfecting existing non-market economic mechanisms, not on plunging schools into market economy.     

Approaching Homelessness: An Integral Re-Frame

This article explores a metaview of the many faces of homelessness. It analyzes an evolutionary meaning of home and suggests that ever-complexifying life conditions influence how societies enforce conformity to the status quo of homefulness. It goes on to describe how homelessness might be reframed as a complex adaptive form of survival for diversity generators who cannot or will not conform to the status quo. The article proposes an integral framework on which intervention strategies could be structured to provide evolutionary, appropriate, and flexible approaches to homelessness.     

A Unifying Principle Of Biological And Cultural Evolution And Its Implications For The Future

In this article I analyze a regular pattern in the developmental and evolutionary processes, formed by a gradual shortening of developmental stages. This shortening is the expected result of a selection process, in the biological as well as in the cultural evolutionary process. Biology and culture are in this way unified by a common mechanism. A mathematical analysis further indicates a vital condition for a continued progress of human culture, especially for a continued progressive scientific evolution, implying continued shortening of mental developmental stages by means of enhanced education.