As evidence of our global survival crisis continues to mount, the expression ‘too little, too late’ comes to mind. We all live in an interdependent world which has an increasingly shared fate. We are participants in an emerging global ‘superorganism’ that is dependent on close cooperation. Indeed, positive synergy (cooperative effects) has been the key to our evolutionary success as a species. However, our ultimate fate is now in jeopardy. Going forward, we must either create a more effective global society (with collective self-governance) or our species will very likely be convulsed by mass starvation, waves of desperate migrants, and lethal social conflict. The greatest threat we may face is each other, and a regression into tribalism and violent conflict. This Element has a more hopeful prescription for a new global social contract. It is based on the many examples of superorganisms – socially organized species – in the natural world, and in evolution.

More at: www.cambridge.org

Edited by Andrej Zwitter and Oskar Gstrein
Drawing on the theoretical debates, practical applications, and sectoral approaches in the field, this ground-breaking Handbook unpacks the political and regulatory developments in AI and big data governance. Covering the political implications of big data and AI on international relations, as well as emerging initiatives for legal regulation, it provides an accessible overview of ongoing data science discourses in politics, law and governance.

Read the full article at: www.elgaronline.com

Philip C. Ball

Agency – the capacity to make goal-directed changes to one’s self and environment – seems to be a real and general characteristic of living organisms. Yet unlike other general features such as replication and metabolism, we lack widely accepted models or theories of what agency is and how it arises. Do modern biology and evolutionary theory need them? If so, what might they look like?

Read the full book at: www.templeton.org

Why do some of nature’s marvels have to wait millions of years for their time in the sun?

Life innovates constantly, producing perfectly adapted species – but there’s a catch.

Many animals and plants eke out seemingly unremarkable lives. Passive, constrained, modest, threatened. Then, in a blink of evolutionary time, they flourish spectacularly. Once we start to look, these ‘sleeping beauties’ crop up everywhere. But why?

Looking at the book of life, from apex predators to keystone crops, and informed by his own cutting-edge experiments, renowned scientist Andreas Wagner demonstrates that innovations can come frequently and cheaply to nature, well before they are needed. We have found prehistoric bacteria that harbour the remarkable ability to fight off 21st-century antibiotics. And human history fits the pattern too, as life-changing technologies are invented only to be forgotten, languishing in the shadows before they finally take off.

In probing the mysteries of these sleeping beauties, Wagner reveals a crucial part of nature’s rich and strange tapestry.

Read the full article at: www.simonandschuster.com

From the pioneering co-founder of cliodynamics, the groundbreaking new interdisciplinary science of history, a big-picture explanation for America’s civil strife and its possible endgames

Peter Turchin, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age, has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields for more than a quarter century. End Times is the culmination of his work to understand what causes political communities to cohere and what causes them to fall apart, as applied to the current turmoil within the United States. 

Back in 2010, when Nature magazine asked leading scientists to provide a ten-year forecast, Turchin used his models to predict that America was in a spiral of social disintegration that would lead to a breakdown in the political order circa 2020. The years since have proved his prediction more and more accurate, and End Times reveals why.

The lessons of world history are clear, Turchin argues: When the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, political instability is all but inevitable. As income inequality surges and prosperity flows disproportionately into the hands of the elites, the common people suffer, and society-wide efforts to become an elite grow ever more frenzied. He calls this process the wealth pump; it’s a world of the damned and the saved. And since the number of such positions remains relatively fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order. Turchin’s models show that when this state has been reached, societies become locked in a death spiral it’s very hard to exit.

In America, the wealth pump has been operating full blast for two generations. As cliodynamics shows us, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture.  That is only one possible end time, and the choice is up to us, but the hour grows late.

More at: www.penguinrandomhouse.com