Evolutionary Ontology Research Articles

Environment, Ethics, and Entity Economics, Economia Aziendale. Historical and Ontological Aspects

The paper stresses the failure of ‘economics’ to predict and prevent repeated economic crises and the most critical topic of the environmental failure and ecological crises, founded also on economic theories and misconceived choices. The implication is a search for alternatives through an ontological-evolutionary-institutional approach and empirical investigations.
 The search for political ‘normative economics’, entity economics, accounting and information science copes with social and ecological-environmental problems, and systems science; it is necessary to keep always in mind these interactions for fully understand and correctly interpret the present ‘social-economic reality’.
 The problem concerning environmental decisions goes beyond ontology and belongs to ethics. It must underline the debates on ‘evolutionary ethics’, not only related with ‘environmental and ecological economics’, the management of environment and reporting, but also with ‘evolutionary ontology’; the new perspective affirms that ‘existence’, for instance, of a moral behavioral attitude, can reveal itself as a ‘norm’ thus relating ethics to ontology.
 General economists, entity economics theorists, as well as accountants and information scientists should be familiar with the potentials and limits of ‘ontology’, also for the ongoing expansion of computerization of scientific research in most of the scientific domains. The renewed interest, particularly in ontology, arouse specifically from systems scientists in constructing a wide variety of artificial intelligent systems. For its analysis, the study has been structured into two periods of time: until the middle of the 20th century and from that moment on. The paper ends by showing the new developments in information systems and their ontological approach

Empirical and philosophical problems with the subspecies rank.

Species‐level taxonomy derives from empirical sources (data and techniques) that assess the existence of spatiotemporal evolutionary lineages via various species “concepts.” These concepts determine if observed lineages are independent given a particular methodology and ontology, which relates the metaphysical species concept to what “kind” of thing a species is in reality. Often, species concepts fail to link epistemology back to ontology. This lack of coherence is in part responsible for the persistence of the subspecies rank, which in modern usage often functions as a placeholder between the evolutionary events of divergence or collapse of incipient species. Thus, prospective events like lineages merging or diverging require information from unknowable future information. This is also conditioned on evidence that the lineage already has a detectably distinct evolutionary history. Ranking these lineages as subspecies can seem attractive given that many lineages do not exhibit intrinsic reproductive isolation. We argue that using subspecies is indefensible on philosophical and empirical grounds. Ontologically, the rank of subspecies is either identical to that of species or undefined in the context of evolutionary lineages representing spatiotemporally defined individuals. Some species concepts more inclined to consider subspecies, like the Biological Species Concept, are disconnected from evolutionary ontology and do not consider genealogy. Even if ontology is ignored, methods addressing reproductive isolation are often indirect and fail to capture the range of scenarios linking gene flow to species identity over space and time. The use of subspecies and reliance on reproductive isolation as a basis for an operational species concept can also conflict with ethical issues governing the protection of species. We provide a way forward for recognizing and naming species that links theoretical and operational species concepts regardless of the magnitude of reproductive isolation.

Freedom to Choose Between Good and Evil: Theological Anthropology in Discussion with Philosophy

After a brief discussion of the terms determinism and free will, the paper sets out to compare some recent philosophical approaches to the problem of free will with a theological anthropology account of the notion. It aims to defend the claim, that even though different kind of questions are asked on both sides, they tackle similar issues and a complementary approach is needed. Recent philosophy considers the problem mostly from the standpoint of logic, naturalist evolutionary ontology and cognitive science. In the Christian theological tradition, the idea of free will has been discussed mostly from the perspective of the problem of sin and grace, thus on the grounds of soteriology, hamartiology and theological ethics. The paper shows similarities between the approaches, mainly between the problem of physical determinism and theological determinism and also divine foreknowledge.

Foster Parents’ Readiness for the Implementation of Foster Family Pedagogy

Abstract It can be observed that changing attitude towards the environment and fellow human beings manifests itself as a socially unsustainable relationship, which in different ways and at different levels manifests itself in social exclusion. Social exclusion is increasingly emerging as a phenomenon that is complex in nature and its solutions must be sought in the wicked problem approach, which is characteristic of complex problems and has significant ontological roots. At present, ontology should consider the much more complicated problem of what types of being are formed by both the natural and the cultural evolutionary processes. It can be argued that evolutionary ontology attempts to create a new image of the world and of humans – a new non-anthropocentric cosmology, i.e., a consistently philosophical culturological cosmology that takes into account reality in its real structure as a conflict between the spontaneous activity of nature and the socio-cultural activity of humans (Šmajs, 2008, p. 96). The reasons for social exclusion can be different, and its specific manifestations are various, and the same can be said about the phenomenon of social inclusion, which is the expression of the quality of other relationships and attitudes. Externally observable signs of social exclusion are more closely related to the concept of families at risk. A social risk family can be defined as a family that experiences difficult problems and has limited opportunities to provide favorable living conditions for the comprehensive development of all family members. More and more often it is associated with unsustainable cultural or non-cultural contexts, mainly related to non-ecological culture prosperity in the consumer society. It can be noted that this context in its current form (which includes manufacturing, consumption, material culture, and technology, and both the social, intellectual, and material life of humans) is quite anti-natural oriented in its principle. Unfortunately, the aggressive anti-natural sociocultural strategy permeated also the field of human upbringing and education (Šmajs, 2008, p. 194). At the beginning of the 21st century, it has emerged as the Anthropocene era in a broader sense, in which the geological characterization of the era is complemented by the characterization of the sustainability of public relations in a broader holistic perspective. The aim of the article is to consider a number of real cases in a broader perspective from the point of view of foster family pedagogy, identify the choice of foster care approaches and evaluate the results obtained. From the perspective of foster family pedagogy, foster parents and foster children are participants in the lifelong learning process, where the mutual influence and interaction of foster parents and foster children are studied. The authors evaluated real situations from the perspective of foster family pedagogy and children’s involvement in the family structure. The article also examines the influence of the foster family and its readiness to overcome the effects of Anthropocene unsustainability.

진화 존재론을 향하여 - 다윈 진화론의 존재론적 맥락 -

진화 존재론을 향하여 - 다윈 진화론의 존재론적 맥락 -

Evolutionary ontology and biofile transformation of culture

The author claims that two large transformations of the human adaptive strategy have occurred in the course of our species’ history: first, the self-preservation modification at the beginning of the anatomically modern humans’ origination; second, the spiritual abandonment of live nature two millennia before the end of the Neolithic culture. Moreover the third transformation, the shift from the predatory spiritual paradigm to the biofile paradigm, has to be undergone today. This transformation is specified with respect to the natural sciences and education system. *** Ontologia evolutiva e transformação biofílica da cultura ***O autor afirma que no curso da história da nossa espécie ocorreram duas grandes transformações na estratégia adaptativa humana: primeiro, a modificação da autopreservação no início da origem anatomicamente moderna dos humanos; segundo, o abandono espiritual da natureza viva dois milênios antes do fim da cultura neolítica. E a terceira transformação, esta a ser efetivada hoje, corresponde à mudança do paradigma espiritual predatório para o paradigma biofílico. Essa transformação é especificamente relativa às ciências naturais e ao sistema educacional.Palavras-chave: Ontologia evolutiva. Natureza. Cultura. Paradigma espiritual predatório. Paradigma espiritual biofílico.

Modernism and nihilism of the Constitution for the Earth

Abstract This article uses the post-modern Nietzsche affirmation as a criterion for an analysis of the philosophical concept of the Constitution for the Earth (Šmajs, 2015) and other texts by Josef Šmajs, the principal author of the theory of evolutionary ontology. The author draws the attention of the group of authors of the Constitution for the Earth to the risk of the modernist and nihilist application of evolutionary ontology and proposes that the theory be extended to include new criteria and methods to enable it to be applied in a more acceptable manner. The author places efforts aimed at the biophilic transformation of culture into the value-based and ethical framework of moderate anthropocentrism instead of the ecocentric approach preferred by the creators of evolutionary ontology. The author also underlines the risk of the application of an ecocentric approach through the application of recent analysis of media presentations of those who support and deny climate change in the work entitled Environmental Ethics and Behavioural Change (Franks, Hanscomb & Johnston, 2018).

Towards Semantic Integration of Federated Research Data

Digitization of the research (data) lifecycle has created a galaxy of data nodes that are often characterized by sparse interoperability. With the start of the European Open Science Cloud in November 2018 and facing the upcoming call for the creation of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), researchers and infrastructure providers will need to harmonize their data efforts. In this article, we propose a recently initiated proof-of-concept towards a network of semantically harmonized Research Data Management (RDM) systems. This includes a network of research data management and publication systems with semantic integration at three levels, namely, data, metadata, and schema. As such, an ecosystem for agile, evolutionary ontology development, and the community-driven definition of quality criteria and classification schemes for scientific domains will be created. In contrast to the classical data repository approach, this process will allow for cross-repository as well as cross-domain data discovery, integration, and collaboration and will lead to open and interoperable data portals throughout the scientific domains. At the joint lab of L3S research center and TIB Leibniz Information Center for Science and Technology in Hanover, we are developing a solution based on a customized distribution of CKAN called the Leibniz Data Manager (LDM). LDM utilizes the CKAN’s harvesting functionality to exchange metadata using the DCAT vocabulary. By adding the concept of semantic schema to LDM, it will contribute to realizing the FAIR paradigm. Variables, their attributes and relationships of a dataset will improve findability and accessibility and can be processed by humans or machines across scientific domains. We argue that it is crucial for the RDM development in Germany that domain-specific data silos should be the exception, and that a semantically-linked network of generic and domain-specific research data systems and services at national, regional, and organization levels should be promoted within the NFDI initiative.

Economic growth and institutions: a heterodox perspective or a new evolutionary ontology?

Economic growth and institutions: a heterodox perspective or a new evolutionary ontology?

Mammals and meaningful taxonomic units: the debate about species concepts and conservation

AbstractMammalian taxonomy based on the diagnosability version of the Phylogenetic Species Concept has recently been declared the only sound approach to mammalian classification. In this article, based on the underlying evolutionary ontology of species taxa, I explain the fallacy of these arguments and hold that in a ‘grey area’ after lineage sundering, completely objective species delimitation is impossible, making both lumping and splitting equally correct or incorrect. As a consequence, we may have to get used to the idea that described species are often a poor guide to the delineation of meaningful taxonomic units for conservation.

An engineering perspective for policy design: self-organizing crime as an evolutionary social system

Here we introduce methodological guidelines for designing policies against organized crime. We employ the evolutionary ontology proposed by Kurt Dopfer for conceiving organized crime as the outcome of social, intelligent agents whose strategies evolve through time. To illustrate the use of this ontology we explore the case of corruption in public procurement processes in Colombia in which criminal organizations—groups of corrupt agents—converge spontaneously. The ontology leads to conceive corruption as a knowledge process that adapts according to the evolution of problem-solving rules that are created, used and discarded by agents that seek to attain personal gains by means of public resources. We also use an engineering perspective that favors model-aided design. We built a simulation model that illustrates how the dynamics of such evolving-rules systems can be conceptualized for exploring potential policies. The application of the evolutionary ontology shows why corruption exhibits self-organization: system-level patterns develop from spontaneous interactions that use only local information. Rule dynamics form a changing structure of rule-populations that adapt to novel environmental conditions and generate meta-stable adaptions that explain why corruption persists despite continuous challenges from the environment. This engineering approach forms the ground for proposing policies that instead of addressing the operant level of a social system (according to observed operations and data), should meet the dynamics of rules that govern those operations. Hence, the role of regulators shifts from “controllers” to inventors of selectionist environments that facilitate suitable change through the introduction or promotion of counter-crime rules, the design of selective pressures that favor the evolution of desirable rules and the attention to coordination gaps at the macro-structure. The recognition of organized crime as the outcome of an evolving-rules system changes the questions that orient policy-making and focuses on the redesign of evolving knowledge. Accordingly, our methodological guidelines address such evolutionary dynamics and can be applied to several forms of organized crime.

On the principle of evolutionary ontology

Evolutionary ontology differs from traditional ontology in the following aspects: 1. subject; 2. means of its interpretation; 3. social role. The abstractly understood natural being is the subject of traditional ontology. The ontically opposing artificial cultural being is, besides the natural being, the subject of evolutionary ontology. This is because its subject consists in the complete terrestrial reality, including the conflict between the Culture and the Nature. Traditional ontology, within the context of the natural being, preferred stability, passivity and reversibility, while evolutionary ontology emphasizes processes, ontical activity and non-reversibility; in compliance with reality it considers natural being to be an activity, to be a process powered by the residual energy of the Big Bang. Traditional ontology has been abstractly academic and individually comfortable; evolutionary ontology, which has revealed the principles of the global environmental crisis, could play a generally philosophical and culturally paradigmatic role.

The End of Capurro's Information Trilemma? (A Proposal of an Evolutionary-Ontological Solution)

In this paper, the author pursues an analysis and interpretation of the concept of information from the perspective of evolutionary ontology in connection with the ambition of information science (and philosophy of information) to create a so-called unified theory of information. He draws attention to the problem of Capurro’s information trilemma, which is unsolvable in the context of traditional approaches to information in information science, or leads to various paradoxes. Hence, the author suggests an evolutionary-ontological solution to this problem based on the definition of information as an evolving (ontically creative) process. Marek Timko Slezska univerzita v Opavě Ustav bohemistiky a knihovnictvi Masarykova třida 343/37 746 01 Opava Clanek je v anglictině.

K ontologickému pojetí kultury

The author interprets culture from the evolutionary ontology’s viewpoint. He notes that culture is a young, artificially created system, inside an older, naturally created system of nature. Culture originated as a human-constructed non-biological system with its own internal information, which is not genetic information but conceptual information, a spiritual culture. Therefore culture is not a direct continuation of natural evolution – its relation to nature is ontically opposite. The author describes two main processes of cultural structures’ origination by means of human activity: 1. An indirect process, when these structures originate without a scenario, i.e. by means of a historical succession (e.g. social institutions and ethnic languages); 2. A direct process when they originate according to a scenario, i.e. as structures with specified information (e.g. the material culture and technology). He also reminds that social wealth originates only at the expense of the natural wealth, i.e. at the expense of the evolutionarily originated inanimate and animate systems of the planet. Yet human species is not responsible for nature, which it had not created and which it does not fully understand. It is responsible for culture, its own creation, which ravages the Earth in an irreversible way.

Evolutionary ontology — A somewhat sociological analysis

Abstract The main aims of this paper are to establish the position of evolutionary ontology within the Czech environmental debate, to identify why its untapped potential may be an inspiration in other social science disciplines and, finally, to suggest that evolutionary ontology be reconfigured in a particular way so that it can capitalize on its potential. A brief introduction outlines the context and the main ideas of evolutionary ontology and is followed by a discussion of its weaknesses: an emphasis on a confrontational style in addressing other social science disciplines and ignoring the specific nature of the disciplines which represent the main target group of this theory. Consequently, I suggested three main changes as to how evolutionary ontology should be presented.

Evolutionary-ontological reflection on physical activity of man in culture

Abstract This article is written from the perspective of Josef Šmajs’ evolutionary ontology and considers physical activity in humans. It focuses in detail on a particular form—physical exercise. In the author’s opinion, current physical exercise (sport activity) and any other human form of activity is part of the internal autopoietic processes of the sociocultural system, which displays an ever-increasingly destructive tendency towards its natural environment—towards the host system of the biosphere. The author attempts to establish the degree and manner to which the anti-nature activity of physical exercise varies, but also seeks to point out how they contribute to a potential biophilic transformation of culture.

Scientific realism and philosophical naturalism in Šmajs’ evolutionary ontology

Abstract J. Šmajs’ concept of evolutionary ontology has attracted much attention in recent years especially in Czech and Slovak academic circles, yet it remains, as some of its proponents claim, undervalued in Britain and the US. Even in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, there are, in addition to its strong supporters, several authors who almost a priori reject the concept, pointing to several questionable, contradictory or even mutually exclusive or self-refuting arguments. In this paper, mainly based on a comprehensive analysis of the first part of Šmajs’ book, Evoluční ontologie kultury a problém podnikání (2012) [Evolutionary Ontology of Culture and The Issues Of Business], we attempt to demonstrate that the opponents of Šmajs’ concept are closer to the truth, since the concept, we believe, is just another variation on the extreme escalation of philosophical naturalism.

Evolutionary ontology of culture and the issues of business

Evolutionary ontology of culture and the issues of business

Biophilic transformation of culture from the point of view of psychology of environmental problems (from cognitive psychology to Gestalt theory)

Abstract The author of the article deals with the causes of anti-naturalism in culture today from the point view of both a philosophical conception of evolutionary ontology, and the psychology of environmental problems. He highlights the real potential for a biophilic transformation of culture in the context of current knowledge on cognitive psychology, where emphasis is placed on the limits to the phenomena of cognitive dissonance. The author of the article seeks certain options to repress these limits in Gestalt theory, which on some aspects corresponds substantially to the insights and goals of evolutionary psychology.

Towards a processual microbial ontology.

Standard microbial evolutionary ontology is organized according to a nested hierarchy of entities at various levels of biological organization. It typically detects and defines these entities in relation to the most stable aspects of evolutionary processes, by identifying lineages evolving by a process of vertical inheritance from an ancestral entity. However, recent advances in microbiology indicate that such an ontology has important limitations. The various dynamics detected within microbiological systems reveal that a focus on the most stable entities (or features of entities) over time inevitably underestimates the extent and nature of microbial diversity. These dynamics are not the outcome of the process of vertical descent alone. Other processes, often involving causal interactions between entities from distinct levels of biological organisation, or operating at different time scales, are responsible not only for the destabilisation of pre-existing entities, but also for the emergence and stabilisation of novel entities in the microbial world. In this article we consider microbial entities as more or less stabilised functional wholes, and sketch a network-based ontology that can represent a diverse set of processes including, for example, as well as phylogenetic relations, interactions that stabilise or destabilise the interacting entities, spatial relations, ecological connections, and genetic exchanges. We use this pluralistic framework for evaluating (i) the existing ontological assumptions in evolution (e.g. whether currently recognized entities are adequate for understanding the causes of change and stabilisation in the microbial world), and (ii) for identifying hidden ontological kinds, essentially invisible from within a more limited perspective. We propose to recognize additional classes of entities that provide new insights into the structure of the microbial world, namely “processually equivalent” entities, “processually versatile” entities, and “stabilized” entities.