From Mbscientific_wiki

Evolutionary Philosophy - overview

It starts with a simple question, why are we here? It is primal one, every kid has probably asked it at one time or another, I did! It dates back to Aristotle, to the shaman ancestors that drew pictures on the cave walls depicting the known and the unknown. Where did we come from?

Darwin shed some light on the subject when he fashioned the idea of evolution of species. There is this tree of life and we happened to evolve on one of the branches. But where did the tree of life come from?

Geneticists shed some light on that subject by rendering the bio-molecular machinery of life. The tree is made up of chemicals.

But where did the chemicals come from? Physicists shed some light on that by figuring out how galaxies are made up in the cosmos, how atoms are made in stars, how the periodic table of elements is put together, how chemicals bind to form more complex chemicals, including the ones making up the chemistry of life.

So we are on this tree of life, made up of chemicals, star stuff. But, although our body shapes haven't changed much, we evolve too, socially, culturally.

Here, we are going to render the big picture. We are going to map where we came from, in factual, corroborated detail. We are going to map how energy coalesces to create shape in a continuum of hierarchical complexity called Morphological Flows. Starting at the beginning of everything, we are going to see how elementary particles in the cosmos bind to form atoms, how atoms bind to form molecules, how organic molecules on earth bind to create bio-molecular constituents of cells. That we call material morphogenesis.

Then we'll follow biological evolution and map the tree of life. We are going to follow the branches of the tree from cells to reptiles to mammals until it reaches us. That we call biotic morphogenesis.

Then we'll follow our evolution, how we have evolved to form the societies and cultures that you see around us, yes we will map our evolutionary history. That would be our social/cultural morphogenesis.

Together, material morphogenesis, biotic morphogenesis and our social morphogenesis will render the big picture. We will see how morphological flows create existence, of every thing in our space-time bubble, including us, in a continuum. We will build a unified model for morphological flows that covers material, biotic, and our social/cultural morphogenesis.

In each section, you will find many links. Some are of animations and movies, suitable for general audiences. Others allow readers to delve deeper into a given subject. And, whenever possible, there will be links to university courses that one might browse, or even sign up for.

This is a wiki project. It ties in to wikipedia and Open Courseware. Contributers should look up Editing_Rules.