Valuescience Framework

Define ecol­o­gy and relat­ed terms: sci­ence, mat­teren­er­gy, envi­ron­ment, inter­ac­tion, evo­lu­tion, adap­ta­tion. Explain Lewis Mum­ford’s state­ment made rough­ly a half-cen­tu­ry ago, “Hence­forth all think­ing wor­thy of the name must be ecological.”

Sketch an eco­log­i­cal frame­work for ana­lyz­ing the human con­di­tion. Include the fol­low­ing fac­tors: pop­u­la­tion, infor­ma­tion, gene, epi­gene, expe­ri­ence, cul­ture, non-cul­ture, envi­ron­ment, air, water, land, bio­ta, arti­fact, resource, hazard.

Explain the sin­gu­lar import of cul­ture as a tool for adap­ta­tion because of its amenabil­i­ty to rapid change and its poten­tial for rapid, wide­spread com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Note that with absence or atten­u­a­tion of imme­di­ate feed­back from nature (exclud­ing oth­er humans) we can eas­i­ly learn oth­ers’ mis­takes, rather than learn from them.

Describe how cul­ture is com­mu­ni­cat­ed, embod­ied, and evolved. Define and explain the impor­tance of the fol­low­ing: semi­otics, lan­guage (word, image, expres­sion, pos­ture, ges­ture), nar­ra­tive, meta-nar­ra­tive, adver­tis­ing, media, news, pro­pa­gan­da, ide­ol­o­gy, lin­guis­tic rel­a­tiv­i­ty, psy­chol­o­gy of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, cog­ni­tive activism, par­a­digm shift, world-view, world mod­el, con­sen­sus trance, clas­si­cal and oper­ant con­di­tion­ing, cog­ni­tive bias, and con­scious per­son­al evolution.