A Call for Unification

There is a paradigm shift taking place in the sciences. It is taking place, though, under a variety of names and in a variety of fields. It is known as complexity or complex adaptive systems or emergence or self-organization or spontaneous orders. You can find scholars working in the traditions of philosopher of time, J.T. Fraser, in the Austrian school of economics, in psychology in the forms of evolutionary psychology, Piagetian psychology, or Gravesean pyschology (the last of which has been developed by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan in their work on Spiral Dynamics), and in complex systems. The latter of course are studied in places like the Santa Fe Institute and the Center for the Study of Complex Systems. The Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders, which is now associated with The Philanthropic Enterprise, and which has been an important institution for my own work, has worked for the past ten years to make these connections. Can we think of others?

But if this paradigm is to finally emerge as the dominant scientific paradigm, we need to get these groups speaking to one another.