OF THE
TIMES
I recently started hearing about the work of the Russian polymath Vladimir Vernadsky. The guy was a brilliant scientist - he was the founder and first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, so not exactly a fringe thinker in his time. Vernadsky took Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's concept of the noosphere and grounded it in his own deep appreciation of biological, geological, and chemical processes - which was a profound understanding indeed as he pretty much invented the field of biogeochemistry. His views seem to have gone far beyond the Gaia hypothesis, probably ultimately inspired by his writing, that was popularized well beyond his death, which merely posits that the biosphere achieves a high-level homeostatic equilibrium.What the heck is life for?
Full disclosure: I haven't actually read Vernadsky, so everything that follows is just me riffing on what I've gathered from a few podcasts and blogs. I first heard of the man's work from that brilliant lunatic Clif High (see for instance here), the conspirasphere's bald old mountain wizard; while I take everything Clif says with an extra helping of salt, he's consistently one of the Internet's most interesting people. Matthew Ehret's study group has also been getting into Vernadsky recently.
Comment: An unpopular view in these times.to be sure, but the conclusions dovetail nicely with those of another astute observer of the homosexual population (among other things), Josh Slocum.
MindMatters: Kicking the Cluster B-hive with Joshua Slocum: Queen B's, Homosexuality & Dealing with Narcissists