ABSTRACT
This special issue is the result of multiple years of collaboration among a diverse group of scholars, scientists, and practitioners. This group came to be known as the Ontogenetics Process Group (OPG). From the outset, what distinguished this unruly collective seemed to be a shared nostalgia for an intellectual space where scientists, humanists, and artists could engage in theoretical exchange without the pressure of superficial “outputs” to satisfy administrators, mixed with an insatiable hunger for the formation of an interdisciplinary conceptual frame capable of responding to pressing questions emerging not just from biological and computational systems (explored here in the essays by Longo, Nocek, Thurtle, and Wolfe), but also from the domains of social and cultural practice (plumbed in the work of Kauffman, Bennett, Espelie, and Wild). As the “roundtable” conversation shows, while the focus of this issue is tilted toward the sciences, the group has a keen interest in asking after the system dynamics, principles of organization and development, and modes of coherence that might obtain in the domains of law, the economy, and so on – and the extent to which those might be illuminated by models from the mathematical and biological sciences. 1
