The Vision of a Deductive Meta-Biology: From Goodwin to Spinoza

This paper attempts to delineate a 20th century movement towards the formation of a truly 'deductive' metabiology. The aim is to reify and crystallize the historical reality of this new meta-biological ‘movement’ by suggesting that what essentially united it was an ontological or epistemically heuristic commitment to a biological vision whose grammar and syntax were provided by utilising non-classical forms of qualitative rather than quantitative mathematical modelling and expression. The paper primarily focusses on the anti-Darwinian metabiology of the Canadian born, yet UK domiciled, biologist Brian Goodwin, as well as comparing and contrasting his ideas withose those of other metabiological such as Per Alberch, Hal Waddington, Rene Thom and Vladimir Vernadsky. It is the contention of his paper that, historically, the purest expression and the philosophical consummation of many of the meta-biological ideas propounded by Goodwin and others discussed in this paper can actually be found in the extraordinary metaphysical vision of Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) particularly as expressed in his posthumously published masterpiece the Ethics (1677), and so this paper incorporates an account of the meta-biological relevance of Spinoza’s thinking in relation to these more modern metabiological thinkers, not in order to indicate direct influence, but as an attempt to reveal the potential metabiological inspiration of such an metaphysical hermeneutic for those concerned to increasingly understand the phenomenon of 'life' in deductive terms.

Aplicações de elementos da teoria das catástrofes ao estudo da (re)produção do espaço urbano: parte 2 – a representação morfológica

Este artigo possui como objeto de investigação a releitura da (re)produção do espaço do habitar em Salvador/BA a partir da noção de morfologia hierárquica estratifica, proposta por Henri Lefebvre (1978) com base na Teoria das Catástrofes de René Thom (1972). Nossa problemática foi decifrar a transformação da habitação em mercadoria a partir de uma interpretação do espaço enquanto morfologia. O método de procedimento empregado transitou do diacrônico ao sincrônico em três amostras da morfologia urbana, a partir do que consideramos ser o processo de constituição da mercadoria-habitação. Os resultados alcançados reforçam as evidências da ocorrência de uma catástrofe capitalista ao longo do século XX e a imposição de uma morfologia espacial mais complexa pela qual a habitação reitera a reprodução do capital, mas não de forma homogênea. Concluímos que a noção de morfologia hierárquica estratificada contribui para o aprofundamento da análise da produção do espaço.

Henri Poincare’s legacy for tipping points

<p>The science of Earth system and climate tipping points has evolved and matured as a disciplined approach to understanding anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic stresses on the Earth’s subsystems in the 21<sup>st</sup> century. However, tipping points is strongly interlinked with the science of bifurcations and dynamical systems, which received a seminal and resonant illumination by the great French mathematician Henri Poincare (1854-1912). Thus, quite a few historically minded tipping point scientists mention Poincare as the seminal, path-setting thinker for tipping point understandings.</p><p>Moreover, Poincare’s bifurcation and dynamical systems-pertinent science is also linked to his seminal role in chaos theory, which illuminates today’s understanding of climate stochasticity. Poincare famously said, "A very small cause which escapes us determines a considerable effect that we cannot see; so, we say this effect is random," which provided grounding for the chaos notion of critical sensitivity to initial conditions. Since Poincare, great strides in abrupt change understanding as linked to chaos (and within an examination of turbulence) have taken place in the science that informs tipping points, such as with the work of Ed Lorenz and David Ruelle. Additionally, the Russian mathematicians (e.g., Andronov and Arnold) have contributed greatly with the refining of differential equations for bifurcation understandings that Poincare began.  </p><p>This EGU presentation is a history of science presentation on Henri Poincare's commencement of bifurcation, dynamical system and chaos understandings as presented by a journalist who has done both interviews and general historical research. The presentation sets key points in Poincare’s biography and pertinent career and sketches the legacy of this Poincare focus up from Henri Poincare through Russian bifurcation scientists, catastrophe theorist Rene Thom, and ultimately Lorenz and current bifurcation theorists, such as Michael Ghil and Valerio Lucarini. It offers light on the ancestry of one of the most important examinations of the Anthropocene, climate change tipping points.  </p>

Diagrams, Conceptual Space and Time, and Latent Geometry

The “origins” of (geometric) space is examined from the perspective of the so-called “conceptual space” or “semantic space”. Semantic space is characterized by its fundamental “locality” that generates an “implicit” mode of geometrizing. This view is examined from within three perspectives. First, the role that various diagrammatic entities play in the everyday life and pragmatic activities of selected ethnic groups is illustrated. Secondly, it is shown how conceptual spaces are fundamentally linked to the meaning effects of particular natural languages and these are very different from the global and universal aspects of Euclidean spaces. Thirdly, it is contended that these modes of creating body and culture-based spatial frameworks and related cosmogonies and cosmologies can be described as forms of “latent geometry” that initially appear unexplainable in any rational way. Nonetheless, and thanks to the deep mathematical reflections provided by René Thom, it is illustrated how the various ways of generating space can be further analyzed as distortions of mainstream spatialization furnished by Euclidean geometry that established the dominant universality of the ideas of space (and time).

Can Catastrophe Theory explain expansion and contagious of Covid-19?

Since SARS-Cov-2 started spreading in China and turned into a pandemic disease called Covid-19, many articles about prediction with mathematical model have appeared in the literature. In addition to models in specialized journals, a significant amount of software was made available, presenting with dashboards spreading of the pandemic for each new. These models are solved by computer simulation of traditional exponential models as a representation of the growth of cases and deaths. Some more accurate models are based on existing variations of SIR model (Susceptible, Infected and Recovered). A third class of study is developed in spatial or probabilistic models as a way of forecasting the effect of Covid-19 around the world. Data on the number of positive cases in all countries, show that SARS-Cov-2 shows great resistance even after strategies of lockdown or social distancing. The purpose of this article is to show how the bifurcation theory, known as Catastrophe Theory, can help to understand why Covid-19 expansion rates change so much and even with low values for a longtime trigger contagion quickly and abruptly. The Catastrophe Theory was conceived by the mathematician Rene Thom in the 60s with wide applications in works in the 70s. The outbreak of spruce budworm in Canada revealed a very interesting opportunity to test Catastrophe Theory whose explanation for the phenomenon was widely debated in the academic world. Inspired by the same mathematical approach to this phenomenon in Canada in the 1970s, we applied the Catastrophe Theory in the current Covid-19 pandemic. We observed that sudden outbreaks occur when the carrying capacity and the rate of expansion of the virus reach a region of bifurcation on the cusp surface. With actual Covid-19 data obtained from WHO, we fitted the dynamic model using the particle swarm technique and compared the results in the bifurcation plan with the Covid-19 outbreaks in different regions of the world. It is possible in many cases to observe the trajectory of the parameters between limit points in the bistable region and the consequent explosion of cases observed for each country assessed.

apport de l’épistémologie de René Thom à la sémiotique

La pensée épistémologique de René Thom montre deux facettes qui correspondent grossièrement à deux périodes de sa recherche scientifique : (a) un platonisme mathématique qui recherche le corrélat des structures topologiques dans la réalité des phénomènes (la période de 1965 à 1977), et (b) la critique du paradigme galiléen en physique expérimentale et la pertinence d’une philosophie de la nature appliquée à la biologie et à la sémiotique (la période de 1978 à 1990). Les deux positions peuvent être analysées d’une part en partant du livre Stabilité structurelle et morphogenèse de 1972 et de son programme d’une analyse qualitative basée sur la théorie des catastrophes (ensemble avec Christopher Zeeman), d’autre part basé sur le livre de 1988 avec la vision d’une sémiophysique et un programme qui se met à la recherche des forces qui sélectionnent et canalisent la morphogenèse du sens (et qui permettent de constituer une sémantique en linguistique et une sémiotique dynamique). L’épistémologie de Thom peut être interprétée dans le contexte de la tradition philosophique de Leibniz à Kant et Husserl. Jean Petitot explique les rapports tout en considérant la sémiotique de Greimas et les recherches cognitives en linguistique et en neuropsychologie. Ces aspects historiques sont discutés brièvement. Cet article essaie de clarifier et d’évaluer la portée épistémologique des travaux de Thom pour la sémiotique et la linguistique. Il poursuit le but non seulement de faire comprendre cette contribution au débat épistémologique, mais aussi de circonscrire le potentiel épistémologique de la pensée morphodynamique de René Thom pour la sémiotique et la linguistique.

Aplicações de elementos da teoria das catástrofes ao estudo da (re) produção do espaço urbano: parte 1 - como Henri Lefebvre trouxe René Thom para o debate

Este artigo trata a aplicação de conceitos e noções oriundos da Teoria das Catástrofes à abordagem da produção do espaço urbano na Geografia. Neste sentido, objetiva reinterpretar a (re)produção do espaço como um fenômeno de caráter morfológico passível de ser representado pelas noções de morfogênese e morfologia hierárquica estratificada. Além disso, propõe funções baseadas no valor como medidas da escala de (re)produção morfológica. A base teórica deste artigo contempla o teorema da morfogênese de René Thom, assim como a contribuição fundamental de Henri Lefebvre sobre o papel do Estado na “normalização” das crises do capitalismo no século XX. Portanto, entende-se que a discussão aqui apresentada é uma contribuição ao arsenal teórico da Geografia, em particular, de sua abordagem da produção do espaço urbano.