INTEGRAL WORLD MAILING LIST http://www.integralworld.net Newsletter Nr. 701 Amsterdam, February 13th, 2018 LOOKING FOR THE GRAND SEQUENCE - An Integrally-Informed Review of Tyler Volk's "Quarks to Culture" - FRANK VISSER Through a Big History related Twitter feed I was recently made aware of the book Quarks to Culture: How We Came to Be by environmental biologist Tyler Volk.[1] It was not only the catchy title that attracted my attention, but also the fact that I have been writing on the interface of Integral Theory and Big History for several years. In my opinion both approaches are in some way complementary, for where Big History has a much more solid grounding in the hard sciences of physics and biology, Integral Theory makes explicit room for interiority and consciousness (i.e. the social sciences and spirituality), and aims to correct perceived shortcomings in the extant holistic models that present "levels of existence", often in a hierarchy moving upwards from the smallest/lowest dimensions to the largest/highest. Tyler's book title seemed to encompass both the exterior (subatomic particles) and interior (culture) dimensions of existence, so this naturally piqued my interest. In his previous book Metapatterns Across Space, Time & Mind (1995) Volk even used the term "holon", which features prominently in Ken Wilber's main work Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995)—which was published in the same year. On Amazon, the term "integral" was used in the book description: "This is new epistemology, a radical approach to natural philosophy, and an invitation to become a citizen in a coherent and integral universe. It will inaugurate a whole new way of seeing, for the metapatterns burst with applications to reinvent the way we perceive and to enlarge the shorelines of our wonder." Read more: http://www.integralworld.net/visser114.html