The bee’s knees
Theologians can think, too
Good ol’ Bernard Lonergan. Though Lonergan studies for a time seemed to be consigned to a rather small group of slightly strange people wandering around yelling “Insight!” at the top of their lungs, we can now begin to say that Bernie’s ideas are breaking out into the mainstream.
Take complexity theory. Lonergan postulated back in the 1940s that myriad “schemes of recurrence” drove evolution in the entire universe, at all levels, whether the solar system’s formation or human cognition. Take a look here to see what physicists armed with computers did with the concept.
And then there are biologists examining the problems of the theory of evolution. Yes, Virginia, there is a problem with the theory, but it’s not creationism. The issue is a lack of explanatory power because of theoreticians’ focus on one element (genes, individuals, etc.) of the dynamic schemes of recurrence, which are nested, in Lonergan’s terminology. Today we would describe this as complexity theory.
Johnny bee good
So for instance, take honeybee colonies. Biologists refer to them increasingly as superorganisms, self-organizing complex organisms whose functioning at various levels is determined by its surrounding ecosystem as well as the internal dynamics of what it means to be a single bee in…
