As organizations place greater emphasis on environmental objectives, business educators must produce the next set of leaders who can champion corporate environmental sustainability initiatives. However, environmental sustainability represents a polarizing topic with some students dismissing its importance and legitimacy. Limited research exists to understand student behavioral influences on sustainability education, especially as it translates to environmental sustainability behavior in the workplace. This gap challenges our ability as educators to understand how to best teach environmental sustainability in order to reach diverse (...) student mindsets. We apply the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to address this gap, investigating the influence of student attitudes, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control on environmental sustainability intention and behavior. A structural model tested with student survey data finds that student attitude represents the strongest influence on environmental sustainability intention. The model also validates that subjective norm affects sustainability intention with students considering professors along with business leaders and politicians as valid references for sustainability knowledge. To tie the results to effective educational interventions, we use the TPB to organize an extensive review of the sustainability pedagogy literature and identify specific teaching recommendations for increasing the effectiveness of environmental sustainability education. (shrink)

Explores the possiblity and process of evolution beyond the standard and established scientific principles.

In this fascinating read, Kauffman concludes that the development of life on earth is not entirely predictable, because no theory could ever fully account for the limitless variations of evolution. Sure to cause a stir, this book will be discussed for years to come and may even set the tone for the next "great thinker.".

This monograph extends the basic concepts of Darwinian evolution to accommodate recent findings and perspectives from the fields of biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics. It explains how complex systems, contrary to expectations, can spontaneously exhibit degrees of order.

"It may be that I have stumbled upon an adequate description of life itself." These modest yet profound words trumpet an imminent paradigm shift in scientific, economic, and technological thinking. In the tradition of Schrödinger's classic What Is Life?, Kauffman's Investigations is a tour-de-force exploration of the very essence of life itself, with conclusions that radically undermine the scientific approaches on which modern science rests--the approaches of Newton, Boltzman, Bohr, and Einstein. Building on his pivotal ideas about order and evolution (...) in complex life systems, Kauffman finds that classical science does not take into account that physical systems--such as people in a biosphere--effect their dynamic environments in addition to being affected by them. These systems act on their own behalf as autonomous agents, but what defines them as such? In other words, what is life? Kauffman supplies a novel answer that goes beyond traditional scientific thinking by defining and explaining autonomous agents and work in the contexts of thermodynamics and of information theory. Much of Investigations unpacks the progressively surprising implications of his definition. Significantly, he sets the stages for a technological revolution in the coming decades. Scientists and engineers may soon seek to create autonomous agents--both organic and mechanical--that can not only construct things and work, but also reproduce themselves! Kauffman also lays out a foundation for a new concept of organization, and explores the requirements for the emergence of a general biology that will transcend terrestrial biology to seek laws governing biospheres anywhere in the cosmos. Moreover, he presents four candidate laws to explain how autonomous agents co-create their biosphere and the startling idea of a "co-creating" cosmos. A showcase of Kauffman's most fundamental and significant ideas, Investigations presents a new way of thinking about the fundamentals of general biology that will change the way we understand life itself--on this planet and anywhere else in the cosmos. (shrink)

Attempts to ‘naturalize’ phenomenology challenge both traditional phenomenology and traditional approaches to cognitive science. They challenge Edmund Husserl’s rejection of naturalism and his attempt to establish phenomenology as a foundational transcendental discipline, and they challenge efforts to explain cognition through mainstream science. While appearing to be a retreat from the bold claims made for phenomenology, it is really its triumph. Naturalized phenomenology is spearheading a successful challenge to the heritage of Cartesian dualism. This converges with the reaction against Cartesian thought (...) within science itself. Descartes divided the universe between res cogitans, thinking substances, and res extensa, the mechanical world. The latter won with Newton and we have, in most of objective science since, literally lost our mind, hence our humanity. Despite Darwin, biologists remain children of Newton, and dream of a grand theory that is epistemologically complete and would allow lawful entailment of the evolution of the biosphere. This dream is no longer tenable. We now have to recognize that science and scientists are within and part of the world we are striving to comprehend, as proponents of endophysics have argued, and that physics, biology and mathematics have to be reconceived accordingly. Interpreting quantum mechanics from this perspective is shown to both illuminate conscious experience and reveal new paths for its further development. In biology we must now justify the use of the word “function”. As we shall see, we cannot prestate the ever new biological functions that arise and constitute the very phase space of evolution. Hence, we cannot mathematize the detailed becoming of the biosphere, nor write differential equations for functional variables we do not know ahead of time, nor integrate those equations, so no laws “entail” evolution. The dream of a grand theory fails. In place of entailing laws, a post-entailing law explanatory framework is proposed in which Actuals arise in evolution that constitute new boundary conditions that are enabling constraints that create new, typically unprestatable, Adjacent Possible opportunities for further evolution, in which new Actuals arise, in a persistent becoming. Evolution flows into a typically unprestatable succession of Adjacent Possibles. Given the concept of function, the concept of functional closure of an organism making a living in its world, becomes central. Implications for patterns in evolution include historical reconstruction, and statistical laws such as the distribution of extinction events, or species per genus, and the use of formal cause, not efficient cause, laws. (shrink)

The author examines the concept of self-organization, or as he calls it "order for free," discussing how it occurs more frequently in nature than originally believed.

This article discusses my book, Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution, in the context of the emerging sciences of complexity. Origins, due out of Oxford University Press in early 1992, attempts to lay out a broadened theory of evolution based on the marriage of unexpected and powerful properties of self organization which arises in complex systems, properties which may underlie the origin of life itself and the emergence of order in ontogeny, and the continuing action of natural (...) selection. The three major themes are: 1) that such self organized properties lie to hand for selection's further molding; 2) hence that the order we see is not due to selection alone, but in part reflects the order selection has always acted upon; 3) and finally that the marriage of natural order and natural selection may inevitably lead living entitites to a novel organized state, lying on the edge between order and chaos, as the inevitable evolutionary attractor of selection for the capacity to adapt. (shrink)

Contemporary evolutionary theory, derived from the intellectual marriage of Darwin's and Mendel's discoveries, leads us to view organisms as successful, but essentially ad hoc, responses to chance and necessity. Biological universals, the code, the pentadactyl limb, are frozen accidents shared by descent. The source of biological order has come to be seen as selection itself. This paper argues that this view is fundamentally inadequate. It ignores those underlying sources of biological order which derive from the generic self-organizing properties of the (...) biological building blocks. Among these generic properties are almost universal aspects of phase resetting responses in biological rhythmic systems, fascinating properties of continuity, symmetry and handedness seen in pattern regeneration across distant phyla; and statistically robust properties expected of eukaryotic gene regulatory systems persistently subject to mutations which "scramble" regulatory interactions. These examples suggest that many properties in organisms reflect a balance between selection, and the rich generic properties which would occur in the absence of selection. Where the balance is "close" to generic, a new pattern of evolutionary inference, and an ahistorical source of biological universals may be found: Those properties reflect, not selection, but the self-organizing features of the building blocks. (shrink)

Niche construction refers to the activities of organisms that bring about changes in their environments, many of which are evolutionarily and ecologically consequential. Advocates of niche construction theory (NCT) believe that standard evolutionary theory fails to recognize the full importance of niche construction, and consequently propose a novel view of evolution, in which niche construction and its legacy over time (ecological inheritance) are described as evolutionary processes, equivalent in importance to natural selection. Here, we subject NCT to critical evaluation, in (...) the form of a collaboration between one prominent advocate of NCT, and a team of skeptics. We discuss whether niche construction is an evolutionary process, whether NCT obscures or clarifies how natural selection leads to organismal adaptation, and whether niche construction and natural selection are of equivalent explanatory importance. We also consider whether the literature that promotes NCT overstates the significance of niche construction, whether it is internally coherent, and whether it accurately portrays standard evolutionary theory. Our disagreements reflect a wider dispute within evolutionary theory over whether the neo-Darwinian synthesis is in need of reformulation, as well as different usages of some key terms (e.g., evolutionary process). (shrink)

We argue that the physics of complex materials and self-organizing processes should be made central to the biology of form. Rather than being encoded in genes, form emerges when cells and certain of their molecules mobilize physical forces, effects, and processes in a multicellular context. What is inherited from one generation to the next are not genetic programs for constructing organisms, but generative mechanisms of morphogenesis and pattern formation and the initial and boundary conditions for reproducing the specific traits of (...) a taxon. There is no inherent antagonism between this “physicalist” perspective and genetics, since physics acts on matter, and gene products are essential material components of living systems whose variability affects the systems’ parameters. We make this notion concrete by summarizing the concept of “dynamical patterning modules” (DPMs; Newman and Bhat, Phys Biol 5:1–14, 2008; Int J Dev Biol 53:693–705, 2009), an explicit physico-genetic framework for the origin and evolution of multicellular form in animals, as well as (when differences in interaction toolkit genes and applicable physical processes are taken into account) in multicellular plants (Hernández-Hernández et al., Int J Dev Biol 56:661–674, 2012). DPMs provide the missing link between development and evolution by revealing how genes acting in concert with physics can generate and transform morphology in a heritable fashion. (shrink)

Rips, in The Psychology of Proof, argues that, through the processes of evolution, logic (e.g., modus ponens) has become established in the human mind as the basis for thinking, and that production systems rest on this foundation. In this paper we defend the converse argument that, through evolution, a production system architecture has become the basis for human thinking, and that formal logics rest on this production system and the accompanying mechanisms for recognition and search. It is through the “automaticity” (...) of the execution of productions that we experience the compellingness of deductive arguments. (shrink)

This book is concerned with, and makes an important contribution to, answering the central question of evolutionary theory: By what mechanisms and processes do organisms undergo transformative change? Animals or plants may undergo alterations in morphology or activity during their lifetimes, but only if such alterations are conveyed to the next generation can they contribute to the establishment of new forms. Heritability by itself is not decisive: offspring can differ from their parents at a variety of genetic loci without this (...) constituting evolutionary change, notwithstanding the fact that on theoretical grounds the standard model, stemming from the Modern Synthesis, asserts that any such variation represents incipient evolution (i.e., evolution is change in allele frequency). Clearly, some gene changes make more of an evolutionary difference than others. By placing phenotype at center stage and treating genotypes not in terms of their selective advantage, but rather with respect to the changes they exert on the phenotype, the author subtly but significantly reorients the explanatory terrain of evolutionary theory. (shrink)