The next round of combogenesis has already started

Abstract

This aim of this talk is to frame and examine the world situation within the context of a big history cavalcade of what I have termed a “grand sequence” of combination and integration from the quanta of the standard model to the geopolitical state, which, I submit, has been the level of human history for thousands of years. But as many have noted, a new scale—that of the planetary--seems to be manifesting, perhaps haltingly, with steps forward and steps back. To what extent can we utilize the evolutionary successes of the grand sequence (focusing on its biological and cultural events) to both generalize and highlight differences in the dynamics of an integration in progress? I use patternings from those past events to point to general tensions and/or synergies that are ongoing in the shaping (or not) of the new scale: centralized vs. distributed; strongly interdependent binding versus loose binding; and emergence along with a new style of evolutionary dynamics versus emergence within an already operating style of evolutionary dynamics.