[1] Why do you have [1:], [2:] and [3:] scattered
throughout your web site?
Answer: To assist you in navigating around this web book, I
have established a few conventions. [1] is a link within the same
file as you are currently in. [2] is a link to another file within the
same web page. [3] is a link to another URL or web page.
[g] is a link to the glossary, with a return link to where you
were in the web book. [r] is a link to the reference list, with a
return link.
[2] Sometimes I click on a link and nothing seems
to happen.
Answer: The webpage has been designed to frequently open new
windows. Images, for example, open into a new window and the glossary
has its own window. If the glossary window is already opened, at say
glosae.htm and you open glosfn.htm, the window, being already opened,
does not pop up again. The new file simply opens into the same window.
[3] Yin and yang are mystical and religious concepts. How
can you include them as the foundation of a supposedly scientific book?
Answer: Yin and yang belongs to an ancient science with many
applications, one of which is mystic and spiritual. To this extent,
Paul Davies, in his book, " The Fifth Miracle ", on
discussing the source of the life-force, speaks of the ". . . the
unashamedly mystical ideas of yin and yang energy flows . . .". Yet,
later in his book, he has a chapter, " The entropy gap: gravity as
the fountainhead of order " where he discusses the big-bang theory.
He explains how physicists solved the source of cosmic energy in the
1980's in that the total energy of the universe can be zero, while
still containing 10 50 tons of matter. This idea is
confirmed by Hawking (1988) and explained in his book "A brief history
of time". Davies goes on to use a yin and yang principle discovered by
scientists, but not recognised as such. He says while a " . . .
convincing mechanism was found to explain how positive energy was
channeled into matter, and an equal quantity of negative energy went
into the gravitational field." Yin and yang is here in its essence
right at the creation of the universe! As if reading from the Tao Te
Ching, he goes on to say, "So, in effect, all the cosmic matter was
actually created for free!" ("Everything in the universe comes
out of nothing" . . . "These two are the same, only called
different names". (Kwok et al, 1993); "Nonbeing is called the beginning
of heaven and earth" . . . "These two come from the same source but
differ in name" (Cleary, T., 1991)).This "natural physical process" ,
he says, was regarded as "superior and more scientific". Clearly, yin
and yang represent a mechanism as well. Hawking, a physicist and
proponent of a field called quantum cosmology, the uniting of cosmology
and quantum theory, also unconsciously propounds such ideas: "The
matter of the universe is made out of positive energy. However the
matter is all attracting itself by gravity." . . . "in a sense,
the gravitational field has a negative energy". . . "this negative
gravitational energy exactly cancesl the positive energy
represented by the matter" (Hawking, 1988).
[4] Comment on the title, "Nature's Holism" : I
always find it rather distasteful when the word "holism" is used
in this context: to my mind, holism and reductionism are ways of
looking at systems, not properties of systems themselves. Having
said that, I just looked in my Oxford english dictionary and found to
my horror that "wholism" and "holism" should be regarded as synonyms
- the "new age" has a *lot* to answer for!
Tim Tyler
Organization University of Bristol, UK.
Reply : "It is possible that some may think I have pressed the
claims of Holism and the whole too far; that they are not real
operative factors, but only useful methodological concepts or
categories of research and explanation. There is no doube that the
whole is a useful and powerful concept under which to range the
phenomena of life especially. But to my mind there ise clearly
something more in the idea. The whole as a real character is writ large
on the face of Nature." (General J.C. Smuts, in "Holism and Evolution",
1926.) - Hence Nature's Holism.
Holism: " . . .reality is not diffuse and dispersive; on the
contrary, it is aggregative, ordered, structural. Both matter and life
consist, in the atom and the cell, of unit structures whose ordered
grouping produces the natural wholes which we call bodies or organisms.
This character or feature of "wholeness" which we found in the case of
matter and life has a far more general application and points to
something fundamental in the universe, fundamental in the sense that it
is practically universal, that it is a real operative factor, and that
its shaping influence is felt ever more deeply and widely with the
advanve of evolution. Holism is the term here coined to designate this
fundamental facotr operative towards the making or creation of wholes
in the universe." (General J.C. Smuts, in "Holism and Evolution",
1926.)
Nature's Holism - whole-making by nature, of nature, through nature.
[5] " . . . it seems that this definition of "Holism" is an
attempt to take the standard and accepted theories of species
interaction and create a philosophy, quasi-religon, or political system
out of it."
Firstly, this site is emphatically non-religious. It does not deal with
the spiritual nature at all. However as the majority of people find a
conflict between religion and evolution, it has had to deal briefly
(one short chapter) with "religion". This emphasis is also necessary,
due to the danger of being accused of being some type of heretic. This
is not a religious thesis, so cannot be a "quasi-religion"!
This is the first time this site, an appreciation of nature, has been
described as a "political system" - quite amazing! As for the
philosophy of it, I repeated what Smuts said - that this is not a
system of philosophy, but the expression of an idea that some people
seem to find difficult to think about.
