For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the science of complexity.
Since at least Plato, Western philosophers have attempted to understand how and why life exists. Attempting to understand our place in the web of life has led scientists, and others with a philosophical nature, to live and study among different societies and ecosystems. Complex adaptive system science has aided the pursuit of understanding who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. When Homo sapiens spread out of Africa as early as 125,000 years ago, our species began to rapidly modify environments as it encountered them. While the initial impacts of humans on ecosystems may have been small in scale — over time, human impacts across the globe compounded and intensified. From these simple antecedents, complex structures among tens of thousands of distinct cultures grew. Yet despite differences among these varying societies across the 510 million square kilometers of land on earth, human action may be in fact subject to unifying principles of organization.