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PURPOSE
In recent
years much attention has been given to the possibility of unifying the
various forces of nature within a quantum mechanical framework and to
the formulation of a so-called "theory of everything." The quest
being carried on by modern physicists to identify the fundamental building
blocks of the physical world began with the Greek Atomists. The philosophy
that underpins it is reductionism: the conviction that everything in nature
may ultimately be understood by reducing it to its elementary components.
But reductionism in general, and the philosophy of particle physicists
in particular, has been criticized for committing what Arthur Koestler
called the fallacy of "nothing-buttery." The problem is that
a complete theory of the interactions of particles and forces would tell
us little, for example, about the origin of life or the nature of consciousness.
It may not even be of value in describing phenomena as basic as fluid
turbulence or the properties of bulk matter as mundane as metals.
Many scientists
recognize that new phenomena emerge and new principles may be discerned
at each level of complexity in physical systems that simply cannot be
reduced to the science of lower levels. To take a familiar example, a
dung beetle or a person may be said to be living even though no atoms
of their bodies are living. A reductionist might claim that the phenomenon
of "being alive" is not really a fundamental or ultimately meaningful
one, but merely a convenient way of discussing a certain class of unusual
and complicated physical systems. An emergenticist would counter that
it is just as scientifically meaningful to talk about life processes and
the laws that describe them as it is to talk about subatomic particles.
A growing
body of expository literature, along with discoveries such as the fractional
quantum Hall effect, an electromagnetic phenomenon occurring at extremely
low temperatures, has sharpened the focus of debate between reductionism
and emergence. It is clear that emergence has relevance wider than physical
science. Other disciplines, particularly psychology, sociology, philosophy,
and theology, are also vulnerable to reductionism. If emergent phenomena
are taken seriously, then it seems we must take seriously not only life
but also consciousness, social behavior, culture, purpose, ethics, and
religion. Philosophers and theologians are compelled to debate the vexed
issue of whether right and wrong are just human conventions or whether
the universe has a moral dimension, perhaps itself an emergent, if nevertheless
real, property.
To chart
an emergentist's agenda, twelve scientists and scholars from several disciplines
and three continents come together in Granada, the palatine city in Andalusia
where one of the most advanced cultures in Europe flourished a thousand
years ago. It was a culture marked by tolerance and an aesthetic sensibility
that transcended religious differences and briefly illuminated the world.
The conversation in the mountain-ringed retreat, which was the last Islamic
outpost on the Iberian Peninsula, is supported by the John Templeton Foundation.
It takes place within the walls of the Alhambra, a fortress-palace built
between 1250 and 1360, on a hill of bright red (hamra) clay. Surrounded
by the Sierra Nevada, the leading thinkers gathered here search multiple
layers of meaning, rife, like Granada itself, with exciting contradictions,
for shards of an allusive reality.
CHAIR
A
British theoretical physicist, based in Australia, Paul
Davies is the author of more than twenty-five books. He obtained
a doctorate from University College, London in 1970 and was a research
fellow at the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge until 1972,
when he was appointed lecturer in mathematics at King's College, London.
In 1980, he was offered the chair of theoretical physics at the University
of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a post he held until moving to Australia in 1990,
first as professor of mathematical physics at the University of Adelaide
and then as professor of natural philosophy until 1996. He is currently
professor of natural philosophy in the Australian Centre for Astrobiology
at Macquarie University in Sydney. He also holds the posts of visiting
professor of physics at Imperial College, London and adjunct professor
of physics at the University of Queensland. Dr. Davies's research has
been mainly in the field of quantum gravity and cosmology, topics on which
he has published more than 100 scientific papers. His books, The Physics
of Time Asymmetry (1974) and Quantum Fields in Curved Space
(1981), written with his former student Nicholas Birrell, remain standard
texts for researchers. He has made several important contributions to
the theory of black holes and cosmological models. His interests, however,
extend much more widely, ranging from particle physics to astrobiology
to complexity theory. For many years he has explored the philosophical
consequences of the latest ideas at the forefront of research, work for
which he won the 1995 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Dr. Davies
has a strong commitment to bringing science, and its deeper implications,
to the wider public. In addition to research and writing that has led
to his best-selling books, he makes almost daily media appearances and
contributes regularly to newspapers and journals around the world. He
was a columnist for The Economist and The Australian for
several years. He devised and presented a highly successful series of
science documentaries on BBC Radio 3, two of which were published in book
form as The Ghost in the Atom (1986) and Superstrings: A Theory
of Everything? (1988). Recently his two television series, "The
Big Questions" and "More Big Questions," won critical acclaim
when screened on Australia's SBS channel. In the UK, Dr. Davies's Templeton
Prize was the subject of an Equinox documentary on Channel 4, and several
years ago an entire episode of the Border Television's series, "The
Beatitudes," was devoted to an interview with him on science and
the meaning of life. Dr. Davies is a fellow of the Institute of Physics,
the Australian Institute of Physics, The World Economic Forum, and the
World Academy of Arts and Science. He is a consultant to several publishers,
as well as a number of scientific and cultural organizations in the UK
and Australia. In a recent book, The Fifth Miracle: The Search for
the Origin of Life (1998), he examines the state of our knowledge
about information-based complexity, argues that science also must account
for the source of biological information, and suggests that emergent laws
of complexity offer reasonable hope for better understanding not only
of biogenesis, but of biological evolution, too. His latest book, How
to Build a Time Machine, was published earlier this year by Viking.
An equation
proposed by Paul Davies in which the so-called cosmological constant
introduced into physics by Einstein is no longer a constant at all, but
derives its value
from the amount of information that the universe has processed since its
birth in the big bang.
PARTICIPANTS
Rodney
Allen Brooks is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science and
director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Working at the forefront of robotics technology,
he seeks to prove that intelligence emerges from interaction with the
real world. With his MIT students, he has built Cog and Kismet, prototypical
humanoid robots capable of learning from experience. His goal is to build
a living machine. A native of Australia, Dr. Brooks was graduated from
Flinders University. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford
University in 1981 and held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University
and MIT before joining the Stanford faculty in 1983. He returned to MIT
the next year as an assistant professor of computer science and became
a full professor nine years later. He was named to his present chair in
1996. Dr. Brooks is the founder and chairman of iRobot Corp. A founding
fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, he is also
a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He
was the recipient of a Computers and Thought Award at the 1991 International
Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence as well as of an IBM Faculty
Development Award and of two medals from Flinders University. Dr. Brooks
has been the Cray Lecturer at the University of Minnesota, the Mellon
Lecturer at Dartmouth College, the Hyland Lecturer at the Hughes Corporation,
and the Forsythe Lecturer at Stanford. Co-founding editor of the International
Journal of Computer Vision, he is a member of the editorial boards
of Adaptive Behavior, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence
Research, Applied Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Robots,
and New Generation Computing. In addition to publishing some forty
articles in scientific journals and serving as the co-editor of two volumes,
he is the author of four books. In his latest study, Flesh and Machines
(Pantheon, 2002), he calls for the development of new mathematical tools
to zero in on the vital difference between living and non-living systems
and describes his efforts to understand prebiotic self-organization.
Highly
regarded for his work on consciousness, David
John Chalmers is a professor of philosophy at the University
of Arizona and director of its Center for Consciousness Studies. He was
born in Australia, and after taking an honors degree in mathematics and
computer science at the University of Adelaide, he continued his mathematical
studies at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. He then went to the University
of Indiana to study with the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, author
of the Pulitzer Prize winning Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden
Braid, and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy and cognitive science in 1993.
Following post-graduate research in philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology
at Washington University in St. Louis on a McDonnell Fellowship, he began
his teaching career as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University
of California in Santa Cruz in 1995 and was named a full professor three
years later. In 1999, Dr. Chalmers joined the Arizona philosophy faculty.
Chair of the board of directors of the Association for the Scientific
Study of Consciousness, he serves as associate editor of the interdisciplinary
journal Psyche, editor of Oxford University Press's Philosophy
of Mind Series, philosophy editor of the Macmillan Encyclopedia of
Cognitive Science, and philosophy of mind editor of the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. His formidable first book, The Conscious
Mind: In Search of A Fundamental Theory, published in 1996, received
widespread attention and acclaim. It is a systematic analysis of the phenomenon
of consciousness, an endeavor he places at the border of science and philosophy.
Dr. Chalmers says the standard methods of neuroscience fail to adequately
address the problems of consciousness and calls for new fundamental principles
- he names them "psychophysical" laws - to explain the relationship
between subjective experience and brain processes. He argues that the
emergence of consciousness, which he says cannot be explained by either
the structure or function of material systems, is tied to the functional
organization of their components, and the nonreductive theory of consciousness
he sketches suggests a close relationship between consciousness and information.
Dr. Chalmers also has worked on connectionist modeling of language and
learning, on the philosophy of language, and on the philosophy of physics.
In addition to articles in scholarly journals, he has edited two books,
including Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings,
which was published earlier this year by Oxford University Press.
Philip
Clayton is a professor of philosophy at Sonoma State University
in California. Out of his twin intellectual foci on the interface between
science and religion and the history of modern metaphysics came a study
already hailed as a "classic" and a "breakthrough in philosophical
theology," The Problem of God in Modern Thought. Published
in 2000 by Wm. B. Eerdmans, the book sets forth the case for panentheism
as the most appropriate model for understanding the relationship between
God and the world. Its author, a summa cum laude graduate of Westmont
College, received his M.A. at Fuller Theological Seminary and, after further
graduate study at Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität in Munich, earned
a Ph.D. in religious studies and in philosophy at Yale University in 1986.
After teaching five years at Williams College, where he was an assistant
professor of philosophy, he joined the philosophy faculty of Sonoma State
where he became an associate professor in 1994 and a full professor in
1999. Dr. Clayton chaired his department from 1998 to 2001. He has been
a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow at Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität
as well as the visiting Alexander von Humboldt Professor there and a visiting
faculty member at Haverford College. Last year he was a visiting professor
of philosophical theology at the Harvard Divinity School. Founder of the
Systematic Theology Group at the American Academy of Religion, he serves
on the editorial board of the American Philosophical Quarterly
and as co-editor of the New Studies in Constructive Theology Series for
Eerdmans. Dr. Clayton is a member of the board of directors of the Philosophy
Documentation Center as well as the principal investigator of the Science
and Spiritual Quest Program, an initiative of the Center for Theology
and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) in Berkeley, California. He is a recipient
of a University Best Professor Award of Sonoma County Chamber of Commerce,
a University Merit Award from Sonoma State, a John Templeton Foundation
Science and Religion Course Program grant, and a Templeton Foundation
grant for research and writing on the constructive engagement of science
and religion. His 1997 book, God and Contemporary Science, won
a Templeton Foundation Award for the Best Book in Religion and Science.
In addition to an earlier technical study of contemporary theories of
rationality in the sciences and theology and some forty-five articles
in scholarly journals and chapters in edited volumes, he is the co-editor
of two books. The most recent, Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives
on Divine Action, a volume edited with Robert J. Russell and John
Polkinghorne, was published last year by the Vatican Observatory and CTNS.
Dr. Clayton is preparing several other edited works for publication and
is writing a book tentatively entitled "The Emergence of the Spirit:
God Beyond Theism and Physicalism."
As
widely respected for his anti-apartheid Quaker activism as for his contributions
to cosmology, George F. Rayner Ellis
was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and educated in Natal and Cape
Town. He received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics and theoretical physics
from Cambridge University in 1964 and has taught in both fields on three
continents. For the past thirty years, he has been a professor of applied
mathematics at the University of Cape Town while lecturing throughout
the world. Dr. Ellis has served as president of the Royal Society of South
Africa and of the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation.
His scientific work on the mathematical foundations of general relativity
and cosmology is recognized for its depth, originality, and wit. He studies
fundamental questions like the observational determination of the geometrical
structure of the universe and is not afraid to challenge conventional
assumptions about how our universe began and is built. In his alternative
model to the violent Big Bang, the Whimper model, all starts with Quaker
gentleness. In the bleak South Africa of the 1970's and 1980's, Dr. Ellis
used knowledge both as a weapon and a shield against violence and injustice.
During the past decade, he has been deeply involved in race relations,
housing policy, and the future of the scientific enterprise of his country.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Institute of
Mathematics and its Applications, and among the prizes he has won are
the Herschel Medal of the Royal Society of South Africa, the Claude Harris
Leon Foundation Achievement Award, the Gold Medal of the South African
Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Star of South Africa
Medal, which was presented to him in 1999 by President Nelson Mandela.
Dr. Ellis holds an honorary degree from Haverford College, the University
of Natal, and Queen Mary College, London University. Co-author with Stephen
W. Hawking of The Large Scale Structure of Space Time (1973), his
more than 200 scientific papers and eight major books reflect the rigor
of his mind and the depth of his moral understanding. His latest studies
are (with John Wainwright) The Dynamical Systems Approach to Cosmology
(Cambridge University Press, 1996), (with Nancey Murphy) On the Moral
Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics (Fortress
Press, 1996), and (with Peter Coles) Is the Universe Open or Closed?
The Density of Matter in the Universe (Cambridge University Press,
1997).
Peter
Fromherz is director of the department of membrane and neurophysics
at the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried/Munich and
an honorary professor of physics at the Technical University of Munich.
He studied chemistry at the Technical University of Karlsruhe and took
a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at University of Marburg in 1969. The next
year he was appointed a scientist at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical
Chemistry in Göttingen. He was a professor of experimental physics
at the University of Ulm from 1981 to 1994 when he accepted his present
position. Dr. Fromherz's research is focused on the electrical interfacing
of semiconductors and living cells, in particular neurons. He is working
on ways to mix biology and silicon and thereby lay the groundwork for
integration of digital electronics and neuronal dynamics. With his student
Guenther Zeck, he succeeded in connecting a few cells from a snail's brain
to a computer chip to form the first ever partially alive circuit, an
accomplishment that has fueled hopes for surgery to repair damaged nerves.
His investigations could also yield insights on biological memory storage,
and by anchoring more neurons on a microprocessor, he hopes to build a
small learning network. A former chairman of the Society for Physical
Biology and a former president of the German Society for Biophysics, Dr.
Fromherz chaired the 3rd European Biophysics Congress in Munich in 2000.
He is a member of the Academy of Sciences in Heidelberg and a winner of
the Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics. He has published more than
100 papers in scientific journals.
A
research professor in science and theology at the University of Aarhus,
Niels Henrik Gregersen is also an
ordained minister of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Denmark. His primary
fields of research are systematic theology and the intersection of science
and religion. Dr. Gregersen graduated from the Haderslev Cathedral School
and the University of Copenhagen, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1987. He
began his academic career as an assistant professor in ethics and philosophy
of religion at Aarhus, became an associate professor of systematic theology
in 1989, and was named to his present position in 2000. He has served
as assistant pastor of the university's Church of St. John. President
of the Learned Society of Denmark, Dr. Gregersen was formerly vice president
of the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology. He is a
member of the Theological Commission of the Church of Denmark's Council
on Inter-Church Relations, a member of the board of advisors of the John
Templeton Foundation, and since 1992, he has been a leader of the Danish
Forum for Science and Theology. Dr. Gregersen is the recipient of a Templeton
Foundation Science and Religion Course Program grant and a Templeton Foundation
grant for research and writing on the constructive engagement of science
and religion. He also has received research support from the Danish Research
Foundation for the Humanities, the Felix Foundation, the Niels Møgelvang
Foundation, and the Research Foundation of the University of Aarhus. Fomerly
general editor of Studies in Science and Theology, he is systematic
theology editor of the Danish Journal of Theology and associate
editor of the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, as well as
a member of the editorial advisory board of Zygon: Journal of Religion
and Science and a member of the editorial council of Dialog: A
Journal of Theology. A former member of the editorial board of the
Danish publisher ANIS and currently co-editor of the Complementa Series
published by the University of Aarhus Press, he has inaugurated the new
Issues in Science and Theology Series, which will be published in Scotland
by T & T Clark and in the United States by Wm. B. Eerdmans. Dr. Gregersen
has contributed more than sixty major articles in Nordic, German, and
English to scholarly journals, a number of which have won prizes, and
he is the author of three books and co-author of two others in addition
to co-editing five volumes of collected works. The most recent (with Willem
B. Drees and Ulf Görman), The Human Person in Science and Theology,
was published by T & T Clark and Eerdmans in 2000.
The reductive
citric acid cycle pictured here is possibly the earliest metabolic network.
Credit: Reproduced from "The Origins of Intermediary Metabolism" by Harold J. Morowitz,
Jennifer D. Kostelnik, Jeremy Yang, and George D. Cody in The Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 97 (2000), p. 7704.
Jaegwon
Kim, the William Herbert Perry Faunce Professor of Philosophy
at Brown University, is one of the most pre-eminent and influential contributors
to the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Construing the mind-body problem
as that of finding a place for mind in a world that is fundamentally physical,
he introduced the "supervenience" theory of mind in a series
of groundbreaking essays in which he argued that while mental properties
may not be reducible to physical properties, they are dependent, or supervenient,
on them in such a way that all changes in mental properties must be accompanied
by changes in physical properties but not vice versa. Dr. Kim is a native
of South Korea. After studying for two years at Seoul National University,
he came to the United States in 1955 and entered Dartmouth College where
he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and received his A.B. summa cum laude.
He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton in 1962. Dr. Kim began his
teaching career at Swarthmore College, and in 1963, he was appointed an
assistant professor at Brown. He joined the University of Michigan faculty
as an associate professor in 1967, accepted an associate professorship
at Cornell in 1970, and returned to Michigan as a professor of philosophy
in 1971. He simultaneously held a professorship in philosophy at The Johns
Hopkins University in 1977-78. Named to the Roy Wood Sellers Chair at
Michigan in 1986, he accepted his present position at Brown the next year.
Dr. Kim has been the Visiting McMahon/Hank Professor of Philosophy at
the University of Notre Dame, a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the
University of Witerwatersrand, a Visiting Fulbright Professor at the Seoul
National University, and a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania
in addition to giving invited lectures throughout the world. His research
has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National
Science Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. A former
president of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association
and a former member of the governing board of the Philosophy of Science
Association, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and an elected member of the Paris-based Institut International de Philosophie.
Dr. Kim is a former editor of The Philosophical Review and former
member of the editorial boards of Synthese and of Nous,
a journal of which he is now the co-editor. In addition, he currently
serves on the editorial boards of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy Supplement, and Philosophical
Issues, as well as on the board of editorial consultants of Philosophical
Papers and Philosophical Explorations. He has published nearly 100
articles in academic journals, edited six books, and is the author of
three major studies: Supervenience and the Mind: Selected Philosophical
Essays (1993), Philosophy of Mind (1996), and, most recently,
Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental
Causation, which was published in 1998 by MIT Press/Bradford Books
and has been translated into Korean, Italian, and Polish. Dr. Kim is currently
completing a monograph entitled Physicalism, or Something Near Enough.
It is expected to be published in 2003 by Princeton University Press.
A
philosopher of science and a Christian theologian, Nancey
Claire Murphy teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary where
she is professor of Christian philosophy. She was ordained in 1991 as
a minister in the Church of the Brethren, a denomination related to the
Mennonites. A summa cum laude graduate of Creighton University,
she earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley,
in 1980 and a doctorate in theology and philosophy of religion seven years
later at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Dr. Murphy was a
teaching fellow at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, a lecturer
in philosophy at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley,
and a visiting assistant professor of religion at Whittier College before
joining the Fuller faculty as an assistant professor in 1989. Promoted
to associate professor in 1991, she was named to her present position
in 1998. Dr. Murphy has held a National Science Foundation Fellowship
and received a Creighton University Alumni Achievement Award. She serves
on the board of directors of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences
in Berkeley and on the board of advisors of the John Templeton Foundation.
A corresponding editor of Christianity Today, Dr. Murphy also serves
on the editorial advisory board of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science.
In addition to contributing articles to scholarly journals and chapters
to volumes of collected works, she has co-edited six books. She is the
co-author (with George F.R. Ellis) of On the Moral Nature of the Universe:
Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics (1996) and the author of five other
books, including Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (1990),
which won awards from the American Academy of Religion and the Templeton
Foundation. Her most recent studies are Anglo-American Postmodernity:
Philosophical Perspectives on Science, Religion, and Ethics (Westview
Press, 1997) and Reconciling Theology and Science: A Radical Reformation
Perspective (Pandora Press, 1997). She is currently completing a book
with Warren S. Brown on neuroscience and philosophy of mind (expected
publication in 2003).
Arthur
Peacocke, the 2001 winner of the Templeton Prize for Progress
in Religion, devoted the first twenty-five years of his career to teaching
and research in the field of physical biochemistry, specializing in biological
macromolecules and making significant contributions to our understanding
of the structure of DNA. His principal interest during the past twenty-five
years has been in exploring the relation of science to theology. After
going up to Oxford, where he was a scholarship student at Exeter College
and took first class honors in chemistry, he worked in the Physical Chemistry
Laboratory, with Nobel laureate Sir Cyril Hinshelwood, and earned a D.
Phil. in physical biochemistry in 1948. For the next eleven years, he
taught at the University of Birmingham and then returned to Oxford as
a fellow and tutor at St. Peter's College from 1959 to 1973. In addition
to publishing more than 125 papers and three books in his field, he served
as editor of Biopolymers, the Biochemical Journal, and a
series of monographs on physical biochemistry published by Oxford University
Press. While lecturing at Birmingham, Dr. Peacocke also had studied theology,
and he was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1971. He went
on to serve as dean, and as a fellow, of Clare College, Cambridge, for
eleven years. In 1985, he became founding director of the Ian Ramsey Centre
at St. Cross College, Oxford, a position he held until 1988. To oversee
the administration of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, he resumed
the directorship of the Centre, which studies issues in the relation of
theology to science, from 1995 to 1999. A founder of the Science and Religion
Forum in the United Kingdom, of the corresponding European society (ESSSAT),
and of the Society of Ordained Scientists, a new dispersed religious order,
he is an honorary chaplain and canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford
and a member of the board of advisors of the Templeton Foundation. Dr.
Peacocke has been awarded the senior degree of D.Sc. as well as a D.D.
by Oxford and honorary degrees from Georgetown University and De Pauw
University. He was made a member of the Order of the British Empire by
Queen Elizabeth II in 1993. The author of ten books exploring the relationship
between science and religion, his studies include Theology for a Scientific
Age (1990 and 1993), winner of a Templeton Foundation Outstanding
Book Prize, From DNA to Dean: Reflections and Explorations of a Priest-Scientist
(1996) and God and Science: A Quest for Christian Credibility (1996).
His most recent book, Paths From Science Towards God: The End of All
Our Exploring, was published last year by Oneworld Publications. Drawing
upon decades of creative reflection and writing on science and religion,
it expounds various ways of thinking of God's presence and activity in
the world and of re-vitalizing the enterprise of theology.
A
research scientist in the Earth System Science Division of the Ecosystems
Science and Technology Branch of the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett
Field, California, Lynn Justine Rothschild
does research on the evolution and physiological ecology of unicellular
animals and plants. Her work is helping to create a model of Precambrian
ecosystems and to predict the impact of carbon dioxide pressure and ultraviolet
light on global change over millennia. A graduate of Yale University,
Dr. Rothschild earned a master's degree in zoology from Indiana University
and a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from Brown University in 1985.
She remained at Brown for post-doctoral research on the molecular evolution
of ribosomal DNA in yeast, and on a post-doctoral fellowship from the
National Academy of Sciences's National Research Center, she undertook
the measurements of carbon fixation rates at NASA Ames. She joined the
Research Center staff in 1988. Dr. Rothschild has twice won Ames's Jack
N. Nielson Award for her research proposals and is the recipient of a
NASA Group Achievement Award for her work in astrobiology. A former Hotchkiss
School Auger Fellow, she is an elected fellow of the Linnean Society of
London. She has been a member of the executive committee and secretary
of the International Society of Evolutionary Protistology and currently
serves as president of the Society of Protozoologists. She also serves
as co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Astrobiology
and was formerly on the editorial board of Origins of Life and Evolution
in the Biosphere and on the board of reviewers of the Journal of
Eukaryotic Microbiology. Dr. Rothschild is a co-author of some thirty
articles in scientific journals and the co-editor (with Adrian Lister)
of Evolution on Planet Earth: The Impact of the Physical Environment,
which will be published next year by Academic Press.
Wojciech
Hubert Zurek is a laboratory fellow at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory where he has pursued diverse research interests that focus
on the role of information in physics. In particular, he has developed
a theory of decoherence as an explanation for the transition from quantum
to classical behavior in various settings, including quantum measurements,
and studied the physical significance of algorithmic information. A native
of Poland, Dr. Zurek earned a master's of science degree at the Technical
University of Krakow in 1974 and a Ph.D. in physics at the University
of Texas in Austin in 1979. He did post-graduate work at the California
Institute of Technology as a Richard Chace Tolman Fellow and was a J.
Robert Oppenheimer Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Upon
joining the Los Alamos research staff, he led the Theoretical Astrophysics
Group from 1990 to 1996 when he was elected to his present position. Dr.
Zurek is a foreign associate of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research,
as well as a member of the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute,
where he founded the Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information
Network. In addition to astrophysics, his research interests include decoherence,
the physics of quantum and classical information, and the foundations
of statistical and of quantum physics. He has served on the editorial
board of Physical Review and published some 170 papers in leading
scientific journals. Dr. Zurek is the editor of Complexity, Entropy,
and the Physics of Information (1990) and the co-editor (with John
Archibald Wheeler) of Quantum Theory and Measurement (1983), and,
most recently, (with Jonathan Halliwell and Juan Perez-Mercader) of Physical
Origins of Time Asymmetry, which was published in 1994 by Cambridge
University Press.
EMERGENT
REALITY
Contact:
Mary Ann Meyers, Ph.D., Senior Fellow
A
Program of the JOHN TEMPLETON
FOUNDATION
300 Conshohocken State Road, Suite 500
West Conshohocken, PA 19428
tel 610.941.2828 fax 610.825.1730
www.templeton.org
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