Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Tuesday, May 12, 2020

R.E. Slater - Meditations




MEDITATIONS

by R.E. Slater


Around lie hearts wrecked by words,
Flunged houses of anxious flesh,
Torn asunder by worthless men,
Ruthless their arts of war.

Around lie worlds of noxious fears,
Each neighbor contentious the other,
Benighted by day, sleepless the night,
Led by mockers of wicked heart.

Crying anger, shouting injustice,
Very imposters purveying the same,
Slanders first, divisive always,
Bereft the ways of peace.

Tongues filling with darkest hells,
Angry mouths fiercer than lions,
Feet running tormented paths,
Hands daily given to insurrections.

Bleating lost sheep rallying their masters,
To voices spewing ridicule and scorn,
O'er paths of ruin, pastures most bitter,
Joyless testimonies to each evil day.

All who follow, will follow ruin,
All who strive, so strife will meet,
Abandoning wisdom, fools embraced,
Lands once plenty, now plenteous ruined.


R.E. Slater
May 12, 2020
Rev. May 14 & 21, 2020


@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved


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Remarks

I was meditating on contentiousness this morning... here's what I learned from reading bible verses on the subject:

"If you ever have listened to a contentious person their mouths follow their hearts rapidly speaking slander and destruction.
"They do not dwell on any one divisive soliloquy but move quickly from topic to topic sowing discontent.
"They argue without listening, stirring up new troubles every day.
"Their hearts are befouled, their lips speak war.
"They are unwise; whose paths lead to destruction; and all who follow will meet their ends."

Thus this morning's poem as a tribute lying heavy upon my heart knowing but harm comes from the hearts of the wicked.

R.E. Slater
May 12, 2020

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Verses on the Contentious Spirit
Here's what the Bible says to those who follow in the ways of strife


Psalm 120:7 - I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war.

Psalm 140:2 - ...Who devise evil things in their hearts; They continually stir up wars.

Proverbs 13:10 - Through insolence comes nothing but strife, but wisdom is with those who receive counsel.

Proverbs 15:18 - A hot-tempered man stirs up strife, but the slow to anger calms a dispute.

Proverbs 17:19 - He who loves transgression loves strife; He who raises his door seeks destruction.

Proverbs 18:6 - A fool’s lips bring strife, and his mouth calls for blows.

Proverbs 21:18 - The wicked is a ransom for the righteous, and the treacherous [stands] in the place of the upright.

Proverbs 21:19 - It is better to live in a desert land than with a contentious and vexing [man or] woman.

Proverbs 21:20 - There is precious treasure and oil in the dwelling of the wise, but a foolish man swallows it up.

Proverbs 25:24 - It is better to live in a corner of the roof than in a house shared with a contentious [man or] woman.

Proverbs 26:21 - Like charcoal to hot embers and wood to fire, so is a contentious man to kindle strife.

Habakkuk 1:3 - Why do You make me see iniquity, and cause me to look on wickedness? Yes, destruction and violence are before me; Strife exists and contention arises.

Galatians 5:15 - But if you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.



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8 Qualities of Shepherd-Leaders

by Dr. John B. MacDonald
February 12, 2016


Can we improve on servant-leadership? I propose shepherd-leadership.

One author points out that, in the Bible,

“the shepherd image is one of the few that is applied exclusively to leaders.”

No fewer than eight times in the Old Testament, God is portrayed as the shepherd of his people. In the Gospels, Jesus Christ is described as the good shepherd. There are no better teachers or models of leadership. 

What can we learn from a shepherd about becoming better leaders?

Here are at least eight qualities of true leaders we can learn from the good shepherd in John 10. Take a moment to become familiar with John 10:1-18:

John 10:1-18 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
Parable of the Good Shepherd
10 “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter by the door into the fold of the sheep, but climbs up some other way, he is a thief and a robber. 2 But he who enters by the door is a shepherd of the sheep. 3 To him the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 When he puts forth all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. 5 A stranger they simply will not follow, but will flee from him, because they do not know the voice of strangers.” 6 This figure of speech Jesus spoke to them, but they did not understand what those things were which He had been saying to them.
7 So Jesus said to them again, “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. 8 All who came before Me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them. 9 I am the door; if anyone enters through Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. 10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and [a]have it abundantly.
11 “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep. 12 He who is a hired hand, and not a shepherd, who is not the owner of the sheep, sees the wolf coming, and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. 13 He flees because he is a hired hand and is not concerned about the sheep. 14 I am the good shepherd, and I know My own and My own know Me, 15 even as the Father knows Me and I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep. 16 I have other sheep, which are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will hear My voice; and they will become one flock with one shepherd. 17 For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life so that I may take it again. 18 No one has taken it away from Me, but I lay it down on My own initiative. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This commandment I received from My Father.”
Footnotes:John 10:10 Or have abundance

1. Boundaries. As I’ve written before, every relationship is defined and preserved by boundaries (See: “Leaders, Fools and Impostors”). Stepping over those boundaries damages or destroys the relationship.

A true leader will establish and maintain boundaries. For the shepherd there is a sheep pen within which only his sheep may gather (10:1-2).

For leaders in every area of life, there are appropriate ethical and moral boundaries that leaders need to establish and maintain for the benefit of those they lead.


2. Example. The shepherd “goes on ahead of [the sheep], and his sheep follow him” (10:3-4). 

Any true leader will lead by example. It is not a case of “do as I say, not as I do.” They are to be worthy models to follow. 


3. Trustworthy. Sheep follow the good shepherd “because they know his voice” (10:4). This was learned over time from the consistent and caring treatment of the shepherd toward the sheep.

A leader needs to cultivate a deep sense of trust from those he or she leads. This is a quality where one’s voice speaks volumes about the character and care of a leader. 


4. Provision. A shepherd provides good pasture (10:9). A sheep says of the shepherd (Psalm 23):

“I shall not be in want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures,

He leads me beside quiet waters,

He restores my soul.”

True leaders provide for the needs of those they lead. For instance, they do not grind down their employees in unhealthy environments at less than livable wages. They do not fire them without caring about what happens to them. When it comes to a leadership choice, a person is more important than a profit.

A leader acts in a way that gives “life” to those he or she leads (10:10).


5. Sacrificial. Five times Jesus speaks about laying down his life for the sheep (10: 11, 15, 17-18). This shepherd chose personal sacrifice for the welfare of his sheep. 

So it is with true leaders. They willingly experience personal sacrifice for the benefit of those they lead. It’s not about the leader; it’s about those they lead. 


6. Invested. The shepherd has a personal stake in the well-being of the sheep. A hired hand will abandon them when the going gets tough or dangerous – for him, it’s only a job. The shepherd is invested in the sheep and sticks with them through thick and thin (10:12). 

So it is with true leaders. They are personally invested in those they lead. 


7. Relational. “I know my sheep and my sheep know me” (10:14). 

The true leader takes the time and energy to build solid and genuine relationships with those he or she leads. Those led are not viewed as mere employees, servants, or objects; each is known and treated as an “image of God.” 


8. Visionary. Jesus moved toward increasing the size of his flock – those who would become his genuine followers (10:16). 

True leaders have a vision for the future and move toward it.

These are a few qualities we can learn from a shepherd to become better leaders.

What can you add?




Sunday, May 10, 2020

Anticipating a New Post-Virus Civilization: Ecological Civilizations for Earth & Humanity





It's Not Just a Speed Bump

by Jay McDaniel


President of Claremont Institute for Process Studies, ​Philip Clayton,
asks four questions as we anticipate a post-pandemic world


The pandemic is not just a speed bump, momentarily disrupting our habitual ways of living in the world and organizing life. It's a crisis and an opportunity - so we learn from Philip Clayton's PPT shared below and the work of the Institute for Ecological Civilization, of which he is president.

Indeed, the pandemic and its emerging aftermath are a twofold revelation of sorts:

(1) a revelation of the failures of our prevailing economic, social, and cultural systems to meet the needs of people, other animals, and the earth; and, conversely,
(2) a revelation of the best and only hope, which is that we build local communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, diverse, humane to animals, and good for the earth, with no one left behind.

Philip Clayton and others speak of these communities as the building blocks of ecological civilizations. In such civilizations inhabitants live with respect and care for one another, other animals, and the earth, mindful that they are small but included in a larger web of life. The ‘economy’ is understood as a subset of the web of life, not the other way around. 

Where to begin? If you, like me, want to play a role in helping bring about this kind of civilization, Philip Clayton invites us to ask ourselves four questions as individuals and local communities as we anticipate the aftermath of the pandemic:

  • How will you think differently?
  • How can you organize smaller-scale communities?
  • How can you retain different lifestyles among friends and family?
  • How can you expand these innovations to the community level?

Exploring these discussions is indeed something we can do, now.

- Jay McDaniel


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Claremont Institute for Process Studies

This is the second of a three-part conversation between John Cobb, Philip Clayton, and friends of the Cobb Institute discuss the impact of the coronavirus, and what it might mean for the future. Dr. Cobb is the main speaker during the first part. Dr. Clayton is the main speaker during the second part. The final part is an open conversation.

Coronavirus: Rogue wave or speed bump? And what’s next?
- Cobb & Clayton Conversation - Part 2




MEET ECOCIV - An Introduction to our work


Find out why we started our non-profit, why we are
working on the transition to an ecological civilization,
and what this means. Learn more about EcoCiv at


Saturday, May 9, 2020

The Christian Liberation of Being Gay



Conversion Therapy' Is Fake Medicine - Progressive.org
~ Unhelpful advertisements sharing and extending pain and harm ~


"Homosexuality is not a disease.
The name 'therapy' alone is misleading."


I must apologize once again. This time for the simple fact that I don't put up enough articles on homosexuality as I should. To be sure, there are many articles on this site, but not lately, as I've been exploring many other topics which need to be said and taught. Especially when requiring religious faith, and especially the Christian faith, which I was raised in, that it be updated into contemporary forms of constructive, postmodern theology.

If you don't know my background let me share briefly share it here.

I have had deep bible training and education through the college and seminary level (an undergrad Bible Minor; and, graduate M.Div.). My Baptist faith studies centered on language-based inductive and expository biblical studies. I tried to shun any indoctrinating classes in favor of biblical studies classes.

In my childhood I attended public schools and later, the University of Michigan, entering with a full academic ride to study Aerospace Engineering after turning down a Congressional appointment to the USAF Academy in Boulder, Colorado. At Michigan I majored in applied mathematics, science, and as much classical language, literature and history as my schedule could manage. There I met George Medenhall and David Noel Freedman along with many other very helpful professors and TA's.

During my time at Michigan I became involved with a vibrant local church campus ministry along with the organization Campus Crusade for Christ. Though this latter was welcomed and quite well attended by students across the Michigan campus it was my local church which had the larger, more indoctrinating programs and active ministries which attracted me the most. Each fellowship provided many wonderful years of faith acquisition, witness, studies, fellowships, and ministries towards examination of my inherited faith. But as you can guess, with so much of the good, came acceptable standards of non-biblical thinking and testimony based on conservative doctrine.

To my everlasting regret, I burned out deep in my third year having prematurely attained the level of graduate mathematics. To this day I have wished I had completed my senior year. But be that as it may, I was too conflicted to go any further, having lost any interest and reason for going forward until the Lord cleared up my confused heart.

By the following fall I had regrouped enough to enroll and begin an additional two years of undergraduate studies completing a Psychology major (added to previous psych and sociological studies at Michigan) with a deep minor in biblical studies at the local Baptist College. At graduation I left latter that summer from my home state of Michigan to teach at a small private Christian high school in West Palm Beach, Florida, where I met many wonderful students, parents, church members, and staff.

I taught one year, had been blessed, and been a blessing, to my students, and returned back home feeling called to finish biblical studies this time on a graduate level. When coming back I first worked at a commercial electrical trade business to fill up my empty bank account. As you can guess, Christian schools pay poverty wages while requiring nearly all of your time. By January of the following year, with the encouragement of a dear friend, I applied and was accepted into Seminary.

After 34 years of local lay ministries in several churches I have, even as I was then, been rethinking how the Christian faith might better be centered around the love of God instead of my interpretation of the Bible which my faith circles called Truth. When done, Christ's love won out over my more limiting doctrinal worldview of how things should be, and should be done. It took awhile but thankfully the Lord has led me to spend these past eight ten years laying out important differences between my traditional faith inheritance and where I think its orthodoxy should better be directed given the context of God's love when considered first, last, and foremost above all church doctrines.

The result has been this blog here, Relevancy22, wherein I share doctrine by doctrine, topic by topic, in as methodical fashion as I can, reasons why the Christian faith must be reconstructed when re-centered on the love of God and Christ's atoning death. This re-orientation into the Love of God has been revolutionary in my life as I hope it may be in you, my readers.

Which, I think, at the last, was probably why I never finished Michigan nor held a decisive job in life. Though I spent my years, like the Apostle Paul, in tent ministries, as a consultant and technician to small area businesses. When not working or volunteering at Civic, Educational, or Ecological organizations, I have spent nearly all my life in ministry in one form or another. Out of sight, underneath the fabric of interfering church eyes, ministering to thousands and thousands of youth, college age, and young professionals. From deacon, elder, and pastor's kids, to the many youths and young adults searching for life's questions, direction, and meaningful purpose.

In the end my real business has been the Lord's. My dedication was to the same. My long, oft times difficult journey was worth the lost of mathematics degree and career. It was my time the Lord wanted. My dedication. Nothing else. Peace.

R.E. Slater
May 9, 2020

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Stop anti-LGBT+ 'conversion therapy' - National Secular Society



"This so-called therapy makes people sick, not better. The ban is an
important signal from society to all those who are unsure about
their homosexuality that it's okay to be the way you are."



End conversion therapy for minors in Maryland – The Black and White


When I consider homosexuality I think back to my dear friend and homosexual roommate of two years at the University of Michigan. To his testimony of lifehood, value, and personal respect for himself,  I also discovered the gay students I had met during those years along with dorm-mates and homosexual groups I inadvertantly discovered along the way. As a lad from a country farm and small country school background, I had entered the Land of Oz. One of strangeness and mystery.

My overall experience has been one of positiveness. I discovered a loving, beauty-appreciating gay lifestyle which I admired along with the sad fact of constant societal assaults upon their being and personhood. This latter was what saddened me the most.

From these experiences I can tell you I am not gay, but gay-appreciating. I may not have understood it in my youth but as the years have rolled by I believe I can welcome and embrace gay men and women better than I had been taught by the church in my formative years of youth and college.

When considering Conversion Therapy I consider it one of the most harmful practices by the state and church. It leaves nothing but emotional and spiritual scars, suicides, feelings of worthlessness, and deep separation from the mainstream of humanity.

As a Christian, I wish for all to know how deeply loved and accepted the LGBTQ community is for who they are, as persons and as a group. To personally convey that God does not ask LGBTQ's to change their personhood or identity. If any change is to be made at all, perhaps it might be made in removing toxic relationships from their significant circles of identity and fellowship rather than put up with its continued abuse. Life is difficult enough without bearing the additional burdens heaped on by toxic judgmental voices of misunderstanding speaking death and not life into one's soul.

In all this I, and other Christian brothers and sisters, send prayers of peace and love always!

R.E. Slater
May 9, 2020

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From a well meaning friend who deeply vibrates with the homosexual community:
"So Russ, do you mean you can't pray the gay away?? 😆


My intentional response meant in kindness and support:
"No. Nor do I wish to. To quip Dr. Suess, 'A person is a person no matter how gay.'"



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Rainbow flags in front of the Brandenburg Gate at an event to celebrate the legalization of same-sex marriage in Berlin, Germany, June 2017.


Germany bans gay conversion therapy for minors

by Frederik Pleitgen and Amy Woodyatt, CNN
Updated 8:26 AM ET, Fri May 8, 2020

Berlin (CNN) Germany has become the latest country to ban gay conversion therapy for those below the age of 18.

On Thursday, the country's parliament approved a ban of so-called conversion therapies -- which claim to be able to change a person's sexual orientation or identity -- for minors, and for adults who have been forced, threatened or deceived to undergo the controversial treatment.

So-called conversion therapies, also known as reparative treatments, rely on the assumption that sexual orientation can be changed or "cured" -- an idea debunked and discredited by major medical associations in the UK, the United States and elsewhere.

Oklahoma takes a step toward banning conversion therapy

Under the ban, advertising the intervention to young people is also outlawed, and those in breach of the law will face fines or a jail sentence of up to a year.

Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn said that the ban was an "important signal from society for all those who are unsure about their homosexuality."

"Homosexuality is not a disease. Therefore the name therapy alone is misleading," Spahn said in a statement.

"This so-called therapy makes people sick and not better. The ban is also an important signal from society to all those who are unsure about their homosexuality: It is okay to be the way you are," he added.

Studies have found that efforts to change a young person's sexuality can put them at a greater risk of depression or suicide.

Despite being condemned by medical bodies and having its science debunked by experts worldwide, the practice is legal throughout most of Europe, where campaigns and petitions to halt it exist in several countries.

CNN's Rob Picheta and Jamie Ehrlich contributed to this story.


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What Gay Conversion Therapy Is Really Like


The new movie "Boy Erased" tells the true story of Garrard Conley — the son of a Baptist pastor who, after being outed to his parents at 19, was sent to a two-week long "gay conversion therapy" program. Conley talked about what the experience was really like, and discussed his efforts to make the practice of conversion therapy on minors illegal. It is currently legal to practice conversion therapy on minors in 36 states. Conley was joined by his mother Martha, who experienced a change of heart while Garrard was in the conversion therapy program and removed him before it was complete. "Boy Erased" arrives in theaters on Friday November 9.


Conversion therapy: God only knows


An estimated 700,000 adults in the U.S. have received a controversial treatment known as reparative, or conversion therapy, under the belief that homosexuality is caused by nurture, not nature, and can be "cured." Erin Moriarty talks with young men and women who had undergone the treatment (voluntarily or at the behest of their families) in order to adhere to their church's teachings; with Alan Chambers, who was the charismatic director of Exodus International, which promised to convert those with "same-sex attraction"; Nashville pastor Stan Mitchell, who has rejected conversion therapy; and Jeff Johnston of Focus on the Family, which continues to promote the practice for parishioners who do not want to be gay.


Thursday, May 7, 2020

A Processed-based Evolution: "Process Evolution"





Process Evolution is "How everything
relates to everything else"

- re slater


Having recently reviewed and written about process philosophy over the past several months I would like to apply its concept to all previous articles on evolution I have written on this website. It is a necessary ingredient to any understanding of evolution whether from a religious or non-religious viewpoint. Its principle aptly describes what science has been studying.

When googling "process evolution" I mainly found articles applying the term to business systems but very little, if any, coupling the idea of process philosophy / process theology to Darwinian evolution. However, it would be right to apply the one with the other when thinking how the "circle of life" intricately relates from its whole to its parts and back again.

I think Alfred North Whitehead might describe process evolution as that preceding congeal of actual entities or actual occasions affecting and intermixing with one another as to led to endless outcomes of novelty where each actuality concresces towards another affected and evolving actuality leading to generative, valuative events of becoming.

In terms of Process Theology, God is the unique and initiating Actuality or Occasion who births all succeeding novel actualities and occasions. These events are unique and unrepeatable as well as connective to all previous and succeeding events. It answers the question why quantum particles are strangely connected to each other when separated at great distances. It also speaks to why all of the cosmos, the universe, nature, and life are so intimately bound together with one another.

Whitehead described this idea as the "process of organism" which is commonly known today as process thought or process philosophy. He was looking to circumscribed all previous philosophical discussions within a holistic circle of "beingness" or "eventness" so that when done he had completed what we think of today as "the circle of life".

Process Philosophy is holistic metaphysic which saw all parts of creation as related to the whole of creation, and the whole as related back to its parts. Thus, previous philosophers were simply describing reflective "parts" to the "whole" of the metaphysical world surrounding their observations much like describing the proverbial elephant in the room but not necessarily the elephant (sic, the metaphysic) itself.

Besides Whitehead, Baidou, and Deluze write in similar fashion of "Being and Event" but in Whitehead he uplifts the discussion towards the fuller idea of "Becoming" wherein a divine process is initiated from God's Being or Essence leading to valuative (better described as generative) becoming. When this fails, both inorganically or organically, it is because of the freedom of agency God has gifted creation.

Thus, what we may describe as sin or evil, suffering or harm, is in another sense a result of agency granted creation from a good and loving God. One might describe it as a "fearsome gift" as portrayed in the Adam-Eve-Serpent legend of the Bible wherein all things changed with its taking. In all respects freewill is thus birthed from God's Essence as a good and perfect and loving quality to take into life with each succeeding derivation.

However, when given agency, any unloving, or ungood, disruption is a result of the creative freewill. That is, freewill is a gift granted by uncontrolling divine action allowing a fully free and open future without determination. It was birthed from God's love, not by fiat nor command. That is, as God is free in His agency so too He endowed His creation with that same agency which bore from His divine image. Freewill is, because God is. It did not require a special command to do so; it resulted naturally from God's Being or Essence into creation's being or essence. Thus, God's agency grants all recipients - from quantum forces to living hearts - with endless generative possibilities for goodness and love, positive creativity and constructive novelty.

On the inorganic level we might describe disruptive agency as chaotic randomness if, and when, it creates negative disruptive events within the human purview of life (such as destructive flooding or winds) or nature's reaction to events in its life (such as pollution). But as a process theologian I must insist on the principle of chaotic randomness for a freewill creation to function lest it loses its ability to retain its creative novelty.

Let me explain. Originally the primal earth was filled with methane gas wherein organic life thrived. Later, the gas of oxygen began to replace methane gas. Oxygen was lethal to methane-base organisms. As oxygen expanded to replace methane so old life forms died out. In their place new forms of life resulted which thrived on oxygen - even as methane became lethal to those oxygen-based organisms. The life forms had effectively switched with one another as their environments changed.

This is the beauty of evolution. Life will find a way to survive against all odds. Yet underneath it must lie that generative (and regenerating) principle of chaotic randomness (we know these as Darwinian mutations) without which the life cycles of persistent change would be permanently disrupted thus ending any cycles of life. As such, I find the evolutionary perspective to be quite helpful in representing the sublime feature of process philosophy as relentlessly explorative against all chaotic events leading towards ungenerative becoming.

That chaotic randomness is a necessary ingredient to the circle of life must also be the case lest Whiteheadian process becomes a deniable conjecture. This type of agency must therefore include the event of death. Without cycles of life-and-death there can be no perishable, succeeding actualities. This is the very basis of process thought as perishing entities and occasions prehend future passing forms of actuality in the intermix of relational continuities and discontinuities of actualized communities.

Essentially, Darwinian evolution has captured the essence of the necessary (mutating) life-and-death cycles of creation as a redeemable quality of seeming disruptions birthing-and-rebirthing time-and-again life's struggle for beingness, novelty, and becoming. Its concept is part-and-parcel of process philosophy's overall observation of the world and any future worlds to come.

On the organic level of sentient beings, the clearer idea of sin and evil can more easily be conveyed by the actions we take with one another. We are created to love and bring goodness, novelty and wellbeing into this life. When not, when acting un-Godlike, we fail in our generative or, valuative, purpose of living.

The remaining sections of this post will show how other theologians, scientists, physicists, and engineers are thinking about process evolution related to their fields of interest. Overall, the idea that all things are related to all things is but a beginning point in describing a generative teleology or purposeful result of the evolutionary process of the circle of life.

R.E. Slater
May 7, 2020

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Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures): Amazon.co.uk: Alfred North ...


Evolution and Process Thought

Pages 161-178 | Published online: 18 Feb 2007


Five topics arising from evolutionary biology open new possibilities for fruitful dialogue between scientists and proponents of the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. These topics (with the main authors whose views are discussed) are:
(1) Contingency and Teleology, Stephen Jay Gould, Simon Conway Morris;
(2) The Baldwin Effect and Interiority, Bruce Weber and David DePew, Daniel Dennett, Terrence Deacon, Susan Oyama;
(3) Complexity and Design, Michael Behe, David Griffin;
(4) Hierarchical Levels and Downward Causation, Theo Meyering, Charles Hartshorne; and,
(5) Self-organization and Emergence, Terrence Deacon, Philip Clayton.

In the final section, I look at the relation of science and metaphysics and ask whether the subjectivity postulated by process philosophy is accessible to scientific investigation.



Notes

Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: Allen & Unwin, 1942); Gaylord G. Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949).

S. J. Gould and N. Eldredge, “Punctuated Equilibria,” Paleobiology 3 (1977): 115 – 151; S. J. Gould and R. C. Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptionist Programme,” Proc. of Royal Society of London B 205 (1979): 581 – 598; S. J. Gould, “Darwinism and the Expansion of Evolutionary Theory,” Science 216 (1982): 380 – 387.

G. Ledyard Stebbins and Francisco J. Ayala, “Is a New Evolutionary Synthesis Necessary?” Science 213 (1981): 167 – 171 and “The Evolution of Darwinism,” Scientific American 253 (July 1885): 72 – 89.

Thomas J. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, eds Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

See Ian G. Barbour, Myths, Models and Metaphors (London: SCM Press, 1974); Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: Norton, 1989).

Simon Conway Morris, The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998). See also the exchange between Gould and Conway Morris in Natural History 107 (1998): 48 – 55.

Simon Conway Morris, Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Conway Morris, Life's Solution, 124.

Conway Morris, Life's Solution, 328.

Simon Conway Morris, “The Paradoxes of Evolution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe?” in God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science, ed. Neil A. Manson (London: Routledge, 2003), 334.

Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 293 – 297.

Bruce Weber and David Depew, Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

J. M. Baldwin, “A New Factor in Evolution,” American Naturalist 30 (1986): 441 – 451, and Development and Evolution (New York: Macmillan, 1902). See also Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), chap. 10.

C. H. Waddington, Organisers and Genes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940) and The Strategy of the Genes (New York: Macmillan, 1957).

Daniel Dennett, “The Baldwin Effect: A Crane, Not a Skyhook,” in Weber and Depew, op. cit.

Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 77 (his emphasis).

Terrence W. Deacon, “Multilevel Selection in a Complex Adaptive System: The Problem of Language Origin,” and “The Hierarchic Logic of Emergence: Untangling the Interdependence of Evolution and Self-organization,” in Weber and Depew, op. cit.

Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and Brain (New York: Norton, 1997).

Gerald W. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

Susan Oyama, “On Having a Hammer,” in Weber and Depew, op.cit.

David Ray Griffin, “Some Whiteheadian Comments,” in Mind and Nature: Essays on the Interface of Science and Philosophy, ed. John Cobb, Jr and David Ray Griffin (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1977).

David Ray Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2000), 299.

Ibid, 299.

Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box (New York: Free Press, 1998).

Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism, 287, footnote 23.

Collections of essays for and against Intelligent Design are given in ed., Neil A. Manson, God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science (London and New York: Routledge, 2003) and ed., Roland T. Pennock, Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological and Scientific Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). A bibliography of recent articles can be found on website of the National Center for Science Education at www.ncseweb.org

Kenneth Miller, “Answering the Biological Argument from Design” in Neil A. Manson, ed., op. cit.

Griffin, op. cit., 289 (quoting William Thorpe).

Symposium on “Life and the Art of Networks,” Science 30 (26 Sept. 2003): 1863 – 1874.

See Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (New York: Scribner, 2001).

Ian G. Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966), 327 – 337 and Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues, 230 – 235. See also, Francisco J. Ayala, “Introduction” in The Problem of Reduction, ed. F. Ayala and T. Dobzhansky (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1974).

On top-down causation, see Arthur Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age, enlarged ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), chap. 3.

Theo Meyering, “Downward Causation,” in Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, ed. J. Wentzel Vrede van Huysteen (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2003), 229.

Charles Hartshorne, Reality as Social Process (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953), chap. 1 and The Logic of Perfection (LaSalle, Ill: Open Court, 1962), chap. 7.

Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1984).

Stuart Kaufman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Terrence W. Deacon, “The Hierarchic Logic of Emergence” in Weber and Depew, op. cit.

Bruce H. Weber and Terrence W. Deacon, “Thermodynamic Cycles, Developmental Systems, and Emergence,” Cybernetics and Human Knowing 7:1 (2000): 21 – 43.

Philip Clayton, “Neuroscience, the Person, and God: An Emergentist Account” in Neuroscience and the Person: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, eds. Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, Theo C. Meyering and Michael Arbib (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory and Berkeley, CA: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1999).

Philip Clayton, “The Emergence of Spirit,” CTNS Bulletin 20:4 (Fall 2000): 3 – 20.

Ibid., 15.

Clayton, “Neuroscience, the Person, and God,” in Russell et al, op. cit., 211.

Philip Clayton, “Barbour's Panentheistic Metaphysics,” in Fifty Years in Science and Religion: Ian Barbour and His Legacy, ed. Robert John Russell (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004).

Ian G. Barbour, Nature, Human Nature, and God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 37.

Ian G. Barbour, “God's Power: A Process View,” in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John Polkinghorne (London: SPCK, 2001).

Clayton, “Barbour's Panentheistic Metaphysics,” in Russell, 113 – 115.

Ian G. Barbour, Myths, Models, and Paradigms (London: SCM Press, 1974).

Clayton, “The Emergence of the Spirit”, 6.

Barbour, Religion and Science, p. 290; Nature, Human Nature, and God, 37, 99.

Barbour, Nature, Human Nature, and God, 99.

Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 211.

John F. Haught, God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 178, 179.

David Ray Griffin, “On Ian Barbour's Issues in Science and Religion,” Zygon 23 (1988): 57 – 81.



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https://evogeneao.s3.amazonaws.com/images/tree_of_life/tree-of-life_2000.png


This awesome graphic of all lifeforms
will make you feel tiny

by Jennifer Welsh
May 27, 2015

"LIFE ON EARTH IS ONE BIG EXTENDED FAMILY!" is the greatest lesson from evolution, Leonard Eisenberg shouts at the top of his website https://www.evogeneao.com/en, which he says stands for Evolutionary Genealogy.

Eisenberg created the graphic below to counter the creationist themes he's seen spring into science classes recently. A Penn State University poll in 2011 found 59% of teachers are wary of discussing evolution in the classroom and fear sparking controversy by teaching it. Even more worrying, another 13% dismiss it all together and instead teach intelligent design or creationism in class.

"I run into this even when teaching about Earth history, how life and the planet have changed through time," Eisenberg told Business Insider in an email.
"By emphasizing the 'family' aspect of evolution, in a fun way with attractive art, EvoGeneao makes evolution less scary, more 'family' friendly, and easier for students to understand and teachers to teach."

So what does the family tree of all living things on Earth look like in one graphic? Check it out (Or for a larger version click here):

The age of the Earth radiates out in both directions from the center of the half-circle. As the world gets older, you can see more and more species populate it. The majority of the species on this graphic are still living — except for a few, like the dinosaurs, which are mentioned specifically to point out the five mass extinctions that have changed Earth's history. The graphic didn't include the millions of organisms that have died out over the Earth's history.

"This Great Tree of Life diagram is based primarily on the evolutionary relationships so wonderfully related in Dr. Richard Dawkins' 'The Ancestor's Tale,'" Eisenburg writes on the site. It is meant "to illustrate a great lesson of evolution; that we are related not only to every living thing, but also to every thing that has ever lived."

The lines show different big events — like major extinctions — that have changed Earth's evolutionary history. You can also see the huge explosion of new species at the Cambrian Explosion, 542 million years ago, as the large swath of pink organisms called protosomes.

And we are just a tiny slice of that evolution. Mammals, like humans, are the darkest brown. Here you can see humans as one tiny sliver of life at the end of the evolutionary rainbow:

evo mammals. All of humanity. One little line | Leonard Eisemberg, Evogeneao.com

And even though humans take up a tiny amount of space on the tree, our presence should be even smaller, Eisenberg says. Bacteria, as you can see, take up a huge swath of life on Earth — as they have from the very beginning, through five mass extinctions:


evo bacteriaLeonard Eisemberg, Evogeneao.com

As Eisenberg writes on the site:

This Tree of Life is drawn from the human, mammalian point of view. That is why humankind, instead of some other organism, occupies a branch tip at the end of the tree, and why our vertebrate cousins (animals with a backbone) occupy a large part of the tree. This falsely suggests that humans are the ultimate goal of evolution. In fact, if that asteroid or comet that hit the earth 65 million years ago and helped wipe out the dinosaurs, had instead missed the Earth, there might not be a dominant, tool-using, space-faring species on earth. Or if one evolved, it might be a dinosaur, not a mammal.

There are a few other simplifications in the poster, as noted on the site.

As a retired oil industry geologist, Eisenberg says this project developed out of volunteering with his children's schools, pursuing multiple evolution and Earth history based projects to educate the children.
"I needed a diagram to explain evolution for an interpretive sign. I couldn't find any I liked, (mainly because they were not tied to a geologic time scale) so created my own, hand drawn in Photoshop, using available texts and websites," which wasn't an easy feat, Eisenberg said. It "took about six months and many hundreds of hours to find ages of common ancestors."

Eisenberg is currently working on an animated, interactive version of the tree of life for the website.

See the entire graphic over at EvoGeneao. You can also buy the graphic as a giant laminated poster.



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CIRCLES OF LIFE


Process Evolution:

"How everything relates to everything else"

- re slater



https://itol.embl.de/




https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/all-2-3-million-species-are-mapped-into-a-single-circle-of-life/



https://www.biostars.org/p/820/ - ALSO -https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Tree_of_life_SVG.svg



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First comprehensive tree of life shows how related you are to millions of species - https://phys.org/news/2015-09-tree-life-million-species.html



OPENTREEOFLIFE.ORG

Sep. 21, 2015

Want to know how related you are to a wombat? Or an amoeba? Now you can, thanks to the newly released Open Tree of Life, which knits together more than 500 family trees of various groups of organisms to create a supertree with 2.3 million species.

Researchers have already begun to put these new data to work toward a better understanding of life on Earth. “Everything we study in biology can be pinned somewhere on the tree of life,” says James Rosindell, a computational biologist at Imperial College, London, who was not involved with the database. “It’s highly significant that scientists have finally produced a complete tree.” 

Over the past 3 years, about 35 people from 11 U.S. labs have spent about 100,000 hours scouring the scientific literature for family trees. They had to resolve naming issues—sometimes a species would have multiple names, and at one point a spiny anteater shared the same moniker with a moray eel, confusing the computers. “There is no single database of accepted names, so the group had to come up with one,” says co-author Douglas Soltis, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

He and his colleagues expected that knitting together these different family trees—which often disagreed—would be the hard part. But what stumped them the most was the dearth of digitized data. Of 7500 trees published between 2000 and 2012, only one in six were computerized. Ultimately, the team used about 500 smaller trees to build one large one, says Karen Cranston, an evolutionary biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who helped coordinate the effort. With this relatively small sample size, the draft tree, released online this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “does not summarize what we know,” Cranston says.

But the tree’s website includes links to the original studies examined that offer alternate views, she adds. Furthermore, the site is built to accept feedback and incorporate new data that will eventually be used to update the tree. “We hope the tree looks much different a year from now,” Cranston adds.

Meanwhile, Rosindell and Yan Wong, an evolutionary biologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, have adapted a computer tool they’ve been developing to help people “see” the tree. Called OneZoom, the project works like Google Maps in that a user can drill down the tree’s trunks, branches, and tips to see ever finer details. In this video, OneZoom starts out with an overview of the tree, then zooms in on successively more detailed branches that lead first to animals, then to placental bearing mammals, and finally to humans. For this tree, Wong used not only the Open Tree data, but also data from other studies he identified as important.

“It’s one cool visualization,” says Open Tree of Life coordinator and evolutionary biologist Stephen Smith from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He hopes there will be many more adaptations of the data. If you could combine it with other data, for example, “you can make your own tree of life.”



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Jeremy England, a 31-year-old physicist at MIT, thinks he has
found the underlying physics driving the origin and evolution
of life. | Katherine Taylor for Quanta Magazine


This Physicist Has A Groundbreaking Idea
About Why Life Exists

by Natalie Wolchover, Quanta Magazine
December 8, 2014

Why does life exist?

Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning, and a colossal stroke of luck.

But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat.

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.


Cells from the moss Plagiomnium affine with visible
chloroplasts, organelles that conduct photosynthesis by
capturing sunlight. | Kristian Peters

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

His idea, detailed in a paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.

England has taken “a very brave and very important step,” said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who has followed England’s work since its early stages. The “big hope” is that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.

“Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across,” said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. “I was struck by the originality of the ideas.”

Others, such as Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and biophysics at Harvard University, are not convinced. “Jeremy’s ideas are interesting and potentially promising, but at this point are extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena,” Shakhnovich said.

England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.

“He’s trying something radically different,” said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England’s work. “As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it’s going to be very much worth the investigation.”

A computer simulation by Jeremy England and colleagues shows
a system of particles confined inside a viscous fluid in which the
turquoise particles are driven by an oscillating force. Over time
(from top to bottom), the force triggers the formation of more
bonds among the particles. | Courtesy of Jeremy England

At the heart of England’s idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.” Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses. Entropy is a measure of this tendency, quantifying how dispersed the energy is among the particles in a system, and how diffuse those particles are throughout space. It increases as a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated.
Thus, as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out. Eventually, the system arrives at a state of maximum entropy called “thermodynamic equilibrium,” in which energy is uniformly distributed. A cup of coffee and the room it sits in become the same temperature, for example.

As long as the cup and the room are left alone, this process is irreversible. The coffee never spontaneously heats up again because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against so much of the room’s energy randomly concentrating in its atoms.

Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings.

In his influential 1944 monograph “What Is Life?” the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do. A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.
Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place. In Schrödinger’s day, they could solve the equations of thermodynamics only for closed systems in equilibrium. In the 1960s, the Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine made progress on predicting the behavior of open systems weakly driven by external energy sources (for which he won the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry). But the behavior of systems that are far from equilibrium, which are connected to the outside environment and strongly driven by external sources of energy, could not be predicted.

This situation changed in the late 1990s, due primarily to the work of Chris Jarzynski, now at the University of Maryland, and Gavin Crooks, now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Jarzynski and Crooks showed that the entropy produced by a thermodynamic process, such as the cooling of a cup of coffee, corresponds to a simple ratio: the probability that the atoms will undergo that process divided by their probability of undergoing the reverse process (that is, spontaneously interacting in such a way that the coffee warms up). As entropy production increases, so does this ratio: A system’s behavior becomes more and more “irreversible.” The simple yet rigorous formula could in principle be applied to any thermodynamic process, no matter how fast or far from equilibrium. “Our understanding of far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics greatly improved,” Grosberg said. England, who is trained in both biochemistry and physics, started his own lab at MIT two years ago and decided to apply the new knowledge of statistical physics to biology.

Using Jarzynski and Crooks’ formulation, he derived a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics that holds for systems of particles with certain characteristics: The systems are strongly driven by an external energy source such as an electromagnetic wave, and they can dump heat into a surrounding bath. This class of systems includes all living things. England then determined how such systems tend to evolve over time as they increase their irreversibility. “We can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there,” he said. The finding makes intuitive sense: Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment.

“This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments,” England explained.

Self-Replicating Sphere Clusters: According to new research at Harvard,
coating the surfaces of microspheres can cause them to spontaneously
assemble into a chosen structure, such as a polytetrahedron (red), which
then triggers nearby spheres into forming an identical structure. | Courtesy
of Michael Brenner/Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time. As England put it, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.”

In a September paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics, he reported the theoretical minimum amount of dissipation that can occur during the self-replication of RNA molecules and bacterial cells, and showed that it is very close to the actual amounts these systems dissipate when replicating.

He also showed that RNA, the nucleic acid that many scientists believe served as the precursor to DNA-based life, is a particularly cheap building material. Once RNA arose, he argues, its “Darwinian takeover” was perhaps not surprising.

The chemistry of the primordial soup, random mutations, geography, catastrophic events and countless other factors have contributed to the fine details of Earth’s diverse flora and fauna. But according to England’s theory, the underlying principle driving the whole process is dissipation-driven adaptation of matter.

This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well. “It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization,” England said. “Many examples could just be right under our nose, but because we haven’t been looking for them we haven’t noticed them.”

Scientists have already observed self-replication in nonliving systems. According to new research led by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley, and reported in Physical Review Letters in August, vortices in turbulent fluids spontaneously replicate themselves by drawing energy from shear in the surrounding fluid. And in a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michael Brenner, a professor of applied mathematics and physics at Harvard, and his collaborators present theoretical models and simulations of microstructures that self-replicate. These clusters of specially coated microspheres dissipate energy by roping nearby spheres into forming identical clusters. “This connects very much to what Jeremy is saying,” Brenner said.

Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. A plant, for example, is much better at capturing and routing solar energy through itself than an unstructured heap of carbon atoms. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize. This tendency could account for the internal order of living things and of many inanimate structures as well. “Snowflakes, sand dunes and turbulent vortices all have in common that they are strikingly patterned structures that emerge in many-particle systems driven by some dissipative process,” he said. Condensation, wind and viscous drag are the relevant processes in these particular cases.

“He is making me think that the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp,” said Carl Franck, a biological physicist at Cornell University, in an email. “I’m particularly impressed by this notion when one considers systems as small as chemical circuits involving a few biomolecules.”

If a new theory is correct, the same physics it identifies as responsible
for the origin of living things could explain the formation of many
other patterned structures in nature. Snowflakes, sand dunes and self-
replicating vortices in the protoplanetary disk may all be examples of
dissipation-driven adaptation. | Wilson Bentley

England’s bold idea will likely face close scrutiny in the coming years.

He is currently running computer simulations to test his theory that systems of particles adapt their structures to become better at dissipating energy. The next step will be to run experiments on living systems.

Prentiss, who runs an experimental biophysics lab at Harvard, says England’s theory could be tested by comparing cells with different mutations and looking for a correlation between the amount of energy the cells dissipate and their replication rates.

“One has to be careful because any mutation might do many things,” she said. “But if one kept doing many of these experiments on different systems and if [dissipation and replication success] are indeed correlated, that would suggest this is the correct organizing principle.”

Brenner said he hopes to connect England’s theory to his own microsphere constructions and determine whether the theory correctly predicts which self-replication and self-assembly processes can occur — “a fundamental question in science,” he said.

Having an overarching principle of life and evolution would give researchers a broader perspective on the emergence of structure and function in living things, many of the researchers said. “Natural selection doesn’t explain certain characteristics,” said Ard Louis, a biophysicist at Oxford University, in an email. These characteristics include a heritable change to gene expression called methylation, increases in complexity in the absence of natural selection, and certain molecular changes Louis has recently studied.

If England’s approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization.

They might find, for example, that “the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve,” Louis said.

“People often get stuck in thinking about individual problems,” Prentiss said. Whether or not England’s ideas turn out to be exactly right, she said, “thinking more broadly is where many scientific breakthroughs are made.”

Emily Singer contributed reporting.