Water's Planet: A New Synthesis of Earth, Life & Environmental Evolution, Communicated With Collaborative Conceptual Art

My presentation will survey an evidence-based lifework using collaborative conceptual art toillustrate working hypotheses and communication tools about self?organizing complexity and Earth/Lifecoevolving. At the outset, I will survey some new conceptual art that is intended for broader applications inteaching and learning, within EOAS and perhaps more broadly at our great university.As an empiricist, I have concluded that complexity is not complicated; nature is complex, technologyis complicated. From galaxial shapes to cloud forms and every human heartbeat, spontaneous dynamicalpatterning is a ubiquitous feature of the natural world.Self?organizing complexity — the spontaneous emergence of dynamical patterning in the absence ofa preexisting template —functions as an irreducible phenomenenon. The widespread synonymy of complexand complicated in ordinary and specialist language intersects the common misrepresentation of complex(irreducible) phenomena as complicated (mechanistic) systems. These representations are necessary andvery useful, yet they also foster wrong?headed thinking and conclusions.Problems at conflation of complex phenomena and complicated systems arise at the interface ofclimate dynamics and climate modeling, and are evidenced in the IPCC assessment and in the broader publicdiscussion, including mitigation and adaptation to climate changing. Suggesting a molecular tocircumplanetary unity of functional self?similarity and functional homologies, I will summarize a simplemodel that describes climate as a physiological and living phenomenon. Contrasting a physiological with achemostatic model for climate and climate changing is a contraconventional clarion call that is neither antisciencenor hastily?derived. My conclusions lead to advocacy for qualitative rigor in how we view theenterprise and culture of science. A review of some useful tools for communicating about irreduciblephenomena, will lead to an explicit and testable model for climate changing, that links to what may becharacteristic behaviors of transformative change.To summarize, a simple functional and geometric unity is suggested for diverse phenomena across abroad spectrum of self?organizing complexity, including the ecoevolutionary phenomeon of molecular tocircumplanetary Life. These representations are evidence?based, constitute a set and a unity of workinghypotheses that are implicitly useful and explicitly testable. Using examples that encapsulate a largerpedagogy, I will sketch a route to understanding Earth, Life and environment as a simple functionalmanifestation of irreducible self?organizing complexity. These generalizations inform a unified descriptionof Life and a new synthesis of Earth’s climate. The prominent conclusions are here: Climate is not a “system”,Climate is a living consortium, the atmosphere is a literal biofilm, and we must learn to expect surprises.