For some 2000 years or more civilization has been ruled by a paradigm which was grounded in the Judeo-Christian creation myth. It was reinforced by Greek philosophy, Roman Power, Newton’s Mechanics, Darwin’s evolution, and Smith’s economics. In the waning two decades of the 20th century a new scientific and social paradigm has been developing that could have the most, deep, fundamental impact on human civilization since man first moved out of the cave. The old paradigm placed humans in a purposeful universe created by some super normal power for the domination and use by man. The new paradigm suggests a self- organizing universe in which humanity is but one of the created interdependent webs of being.

The new paradigm, which I’ll call the Gaian paradigm, not only has many roots but, can be, and is becoming, the underpinning of a new global network of cultures replacing the now dominant and domineering man-centered Industrial culture. The new cultures will, like all cultures, be a holistic unified coherence of interdependent components. They will result from a deep fundamental transition of our worldview, our social institutions and our lifestyles. The need for this transition is being made obvious by the growing numbers of critics of industrialism. And it is happening, and being made real, in the positive and creative and positive work of organizations like the E.F. Schumacher society.

The coming of the millennium is providing a unique opportunity for the full fruition of a new Gaian civilization. There may be a little more than an iota of truth in the original Biblical definition of Millennium as a catastrophic climax followed by a period of peace, harmony and beatitude on Earth. At least the millennium is being looked upon as a time of change. Minds are opening to new ideas. People are looking for new actions. It is in this spirit of a hopeful deep fundamental millennium transformation of society that I’d like to talk today.

The New Paradigm

Many basic scientific observations led to this new scientific/social paradigm. One was the observation that biological evolution did not progress as Darwin predicted by a series or minute changes which led over time to the emergence of new species. Rather, biological evolution happened in quantum leaps. Major biological changes and new species are created in relatively short periods of time after long periods of stability. This observation was designated by Stephen Jay Gould as "punctured equilibrium".

Two other observations were linked to become the "Gaia Hypothesis." James Lovelock, a scientist working for NASA, observed that the biosphere of the Earth was radically different from all other planets. It stayed amazingly constant, and within ranges which supported life. Lynn Margulis, a microbiologist, at the same time, was studying the evolution of micro organisms over the billions of years before animals appeared on the face of the earth. She found that life forms were interdependent.

Life was able exist on Earth because of a symbiosis among all life forms. Everything was interdependent with everthing else. Life created its own biome. Lovelock and Margulis proposed that the whole earth was a self-organized, self-supporting ecological system At the suggestion of a neighbor of Lovelock, William Golding, athor of Lord of the flies, they termed this living Earth system Gaia, after the Greek Earth goddess.

A theoretical understanding of how Gaia, or in fact any system, might self- organize came from other fields of science including mathematics, physics and particularly computer science. Chaos and Complexity theories made possible by computer modeling have moved science beyond the limits imposed by linear mathematics, algebra and calculus. Study of the transition of order into chaos, or chaos into order, and the formation of complex systems from simpler ones has opened a whole new area for science. Two particular breakthroughs in the field are relevant to the Gaia concepts.

"Self-organizing criticality" is an idea proposed by Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist, Per Bak. His first computer model representing self- organizing criticality was of a pile of sand. As you pour grains of sand on a spot it slowly builds into a stable inverted cone. As you continue pouring the cone becomes unstable until sand slides and avalanches restore a new larger stable cone. He showed that biological evolution occured in such bursts. Simple entities formed more complex systems, which remained stable until internal pressures built up and caused a rapid reorganization. There seems to be a law of nature, self-organizing criticality, by which new forms come into being.

'Autocatalysis,' developed by Stuart Kauffman at the Santa Fe Institute is another concept which provides a theoretical base for the evolution of Gaia. Autocatalysis holds that systems of biological entities may promote their own rapid transition into different forms. Kauffman uses the simple example of the slippery footed fly and sticky tongued frog. The mutation of slippery footedness gave no environmental advantage to the fly until the mutation of the sticky tongued frog. Only then did Darwin's survival-of-the-fittest come into play. Networks of potential mutations may develop and remain dormant until triggered by an environmental change or other phenomena that brings on the avalanche of transition. Autocatalysis, linked with survival of the fittest explains how complex organs like the eye, or new species emerge.

'Self-organizing criticality" and "autocatalysis" are among the scientific concepts that show how biological entities self-organize in quantum like leaps from simple cells to linked complex networks of cells, organs, plants and animals. More than that, physicists like Lee Smolin and Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann have extended self-organizing back to the beginning of time at the Big Bang, suggesting that the same principle may apply to the self-organizing of fundamental particles into atoms, atoms into molecules and molecules into galaxies, solar systems, planets, and life. At the same time economists like Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow, Brian Arthur, and Jon Holland have extended the new paradigm in the other direction, to include economics, social organization, and human consciousness.

This new scientific/social paradigm suggests that people have no superior divine mandate within a universe created for them. They are not independent of, above or beyond the natural world in which they are imbedded. They do have the unique ability to understand, through science, the laws that govern them, to envision future worlds, and to co-create those future worlds within the laws of science. The comming millennium will evolve radically differently from anthropocentric paradigm which has dominated the past 2000 years.

Cyberspace and the Networked Universe

“Everything is connected to everthing else” is one way of stating the Gaian Paradigm. It is a fact of science, and is a social mindset. But it is more than those, it is a fact of technology. “Networking” was identified by John Naisbit in Megatrends, as one of the major new trends of the century. As he saw it, it was a social and political trend. It was made possible by the railroad, the automobile, the telegraph, and the telephone, each of these technologies made the Earth smaller and put people in more rapid and reliable touch with one another. The real quantum jump in networking is only now before us. Computers and the Internet are providing a challenge that has hardly been explored. Cyberspace is a global phenomenon providing humanity the oportunity to work globally in real time. This takes networking well beyond the concept about which Naisbitt wrote only a few years ago, or the concept of transnational networking which was the root of the formation of TRANET, the organizaion with which I’ve been working since, 1996.

The Gaia Hypothesis, the theories of chaos and complexity, the Gaian concepts, and the computer technologies which now face us grew independently of one another. But they form a unity. They in themselves, are an example of the self-organizing principle which shapes all of cosmic evolution. Together make up the Gaian Paradigm. They challenge us to prepare ourselves for an avalanche of social, political and economic change in the years ahead. The coming millennium will evolve radically differently from man-centered paradigm which has dominated the past 2000 years.

The New Scientific/Social Paradigm for the Coming Millennium
A 1998 E.F.Schumacher Society Lecture by Bill Ellis

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