I recently gave a book talk at a salon held on the first
Sunday of every month at the Cornelia Street Café, in New York. (Great jazz
there, by the way.) The salon is called “Entertaining Science,” convened by
Nobelist in chemistry and all-round amazing man, Roald Hoffmann. Time was very
limited because at these Sundays there is also entertainment. I knew I could
not go through all the levels to the detail that they really deserve. After
all, these levels, I feel, should be—they are—fundamental friends we should all
know, in the cosmic sense.
I decided to experiment by flashing through 12 crucial
diagrams in the book at about five seconds each. I warned the audience
beforehand. I said it’s okay to even laugh. What is Volk doing?
The message I hoped to get across was the same message that
a casual reader paging through my book in a bookstore might notice. “Wow, there
are a lot of diagrams that look very much the same.” They differ in words, but
if placed on top of each other the essential structures look very much
identical. And they are.
These diagrams show for each fundamental level how the
things of that particular level were made from the merger of prior existing
things from the previous level. This is the recurrent pattern or process I
noted above, which I have found can take us on a journey of innovation from the
simplest things of particle physics to the complexities of culture. I failed to
earlier note something I wish now to say. I needed a word for this recurrent
process. I am calling it combogenesis. Combogenesis is the genesis of new
things from the combination and integration of prior existing things.
So, if you were browsing the book, despite its obvious
traverse across a vast landscape of different kinds of scholarship and
discoveries, you would visually see there is an integrating—architectural, to
use that word again—theme in the work. I note here for the skeptical that for
this work I reached out to disciplinary experts who voluntarily, skillfully,
and kindly, reviewed chapters that involved their specialties.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
A close-up
I recently gave a book talk at a salon held on the first Sunday of every month at the Cornelia Street Café, in New York. (Great jazz there, by the way.) The salon is called “Entertaining Science,” convened by Nobelist in chemistry and all-round amazing man, Roald Hoffmann. Time was very limited because at these Sundays there is also entertainment. I knew I could not go through all the levels to the detail that they really deserve. After all, these levels, I feel, should be—they are—fundamental friends we should all know, in the cosmic sense.
I decided to experiment by flashing through 12 crucial diagrams in the book at about five seconds each. I warned the audience beforehand. I said it’s okay to even laugh. What is Volk doing?
The message I hoped to get across was the same message that a casual reader paging through my book in a bookstore might notice. “Wow, there are a lot of diagrams that look very much the same.” They differ in words, but if placed on top of each other the essential structures look very much identical. And they are.
These diagrams show for each fundamental level how the things of that particular level were made from the merger of prior existing things from the previous level. This is the recurrent pattern or process I noted above, which I have found can take us on a journey of innovation from the simplest things of particle physics to the complexities of culture. I failed to earlier note something I wish now to say. I needed a word for this recurrent process. I am calling it combogenesis. Combogenesis is the genesis of new things from the combination and integration of prior existing things.
So, if you were browsing the book, despite its obvious traverse across a vast landscape of different kinds of scholarship and discoveries, you would visually see there is an integrating—architectural, to use that word again—theme in the work. I note here for the skeptical that for this work I reached out to disciplinary experts who voluntarily, skillfully, and kindly, reviewed chapters that involved their specialties.