This article examines Vygotskian cultural-historical theory by putting it into dialogue with Stephen Pepper’s root metaphor theory. I focus on Vygotsky’s insistence on the dialectical unity of the phylogenetic and ontogenetic domains in ontogenesis, which he articulated in his account of how the natural-psychological and cultural-psychological lines of development merge with the emergence of sp...

The diverse forms of nature, in particular and biological forms, have long been a preoccupation of the architect. As a special category of natural form, biological organisms exhibit extraordinary levels of design adaptability across multiple generations based upon the inherent ‘intelligence’ of the evolutionary mechanism. Evolutionary design theory in architecture seeks to harness this generati...

The theoretical biologist Waddington (1975, 16ff.) drew attention to the damage scientific progress by COWDUNG – Conventional Wisdom of Dominant Group. Despite Popper’s (1979, 341ff.) attack on what he called “the bucket theory science”, that knowledge accumulates incrementally, adding one fact after another, this is now conventional wisdom among biologists. Denis Noble challenging not only Neo...

In recent cancer research, strong and apparently conflicting epistemological stances have been advocated by different research teams in a mist of an ever-growing body of knowledge ignited by ever-more perplexing and non-conclusive experimental facts: in the past few years, an ‘organicist’ approach investigating cancer development at the tissue level has challenged the established and so-called ...

In the first section, I review succinctly some of the influences and trends, which, seen in relationship, may be viewed as informing bases for whole systems thinking. The four areas reviewed are systems thinking, indigenous worldviews, organicism/ecologism, and complexity. Whilst these areas are referred to in the main Thesis, this Appendix allows something of the provenance of whole systems th...

Framing strongly influences actions among technology proponents and end-users. Underlying much debate about artificial intelligence (AI) are several fundamental shortcomings in its framing. First, discussion of AI is atheoretical, and therefore has limited potential for addressing the complexity of causation. Second, intelligence is considered from an anthropocentric perspective that sees human...