Tyler Volk

Volk's "grand sequence" of 12 nested structures arising from "combogenesis": fundamental quanta (base level for physical law and precursor level for the atomic/molecular "alphakit"), nucleons, atomic nuclei, atoms, molecules, prokaryotic cells (base level for biological evolution and the genetic alphakit), eukaryotic cells, multicellular organisms, animal social groups, tribal metagroups (base level for cultural evolution and the linguistic alphakit), agrovillages, and geopolitical states. This carefully considered scheme affords further analyses, such as one suggesting a parallel between the eukaryotic-cell revolution and the much later agricultural revolution.… (mehr)

The excellent writing and original insights found in this book ought to be mentioned first in a review, but I can't help but start by noting how charming the book design is. Death & Sex is fittingly a naked hardcover book, without a dust jacket, finished in a lovely and tasteful black damask cloth. The single volume is actually two separate books. One side reads in two lines, "Death Tyler Volk" in silver type above a barely discernable embossed "Sex Dorion Sagan" as a mirror image below it. Turn this attractive little book over and around and it reads "Sex Dorion Sagan" in, of course, harlot red script, and Volk's title and name are its mirror image. This book will be a collector's item; there is no doubt about that. I usually mark up the books I read, but I treat this one like the valuable aesthetic object it is. It is also a book that will find its way into the conversations of all your friends. It covers our favorite subjects with humor and depth. We all wonder what makes us the sexual beings we are. Why these habits and tendencies and not others? How like are we to other members of the animal kingdom? Are the Marquis de Sade's sexual practices any worse than those of male bedbugs who pierce females through any part of their bodies to impregnate them? Sagan explores our cultural, philosophical and biological history of sex, along the way showing us facts and quotes that make us wonder and laugh at ourselves. Consider this gem: Lyndon B. Johnson's observation that "there is nothing so overrated as a lousy lay, and nothing so underrated as a good crap." Tyler Volk's contributions on the subject of death are equally amusing and revealing. Looking at death's life-enabling nature, he makes death beautiful. The two authors together have created a book that gives us new perspectives on life. Don't let this year go by without Death & Sex.… (mehr)

Tyler Volk is an earth scientist. That's one of the few scientific fields today where it is actually desired to tend more towards holism than towards reductionism, i.e. to study whole systems as interactions of smaller subsystems, building up rising levels of understanding rather than endlessly subdividing fine points.

Metapatterns seems to be the result of Volk's philosophical insights that parallel the holistic nature of his work. In it, he categorizes phenomena that occur on different levels of reality (atomic, macroscopic, mental, spiritual) according to common patterns - forms - that these phenomena exhibit. For example, the sphere is a form that exists at many levels of reality and that has certain common properties across all these levels, such as optimality / perfection.

The book is not just a collection of unrelated observations. The author builds a coherent system of patterns, starting from primordial ones and assembling them to form more complex wholes. Towards the end, we start getting glimpses of how the complexity around us might be arising from simple primitives, which I imagine is the author's original thesis.… (mehr)