Forging a Human Future - Softcover

The blind forces of evolution brought us this far, but the future is our own to forge. So concludes writer, researcher, and humanist Erika Erdmann in Forging a Human Future. In this remarkable collection of essays, Erdmann draws on the work of renowned split-brain theorist Roger Sperry and many other thinkers, including Ervin Laszlo, Jonas Salk, Ralph Burhoe, E.O. Wilson, James Watson, and Eric Chaisson, as she considers how we can work together to create a future both human and humane.The book's early chapters examine the key concepts of emergence and downward causation. Once science takes these ideas into account, a far richer and more meaningful description of the world becomes possible: a description that goes beyond reductionism to leave room for the arts and humanities as well as ensuring a causal role for human consciousness. Later essays consider the evolution of human nature, the key problems facing society today, and promising new ways of looking at the world that may lead to a rapprochement between reason and emotion. Only with such a reconciliation, Erdmann argues, can we forge a future both human and humane. For in a world threatened by environmental degradation, resource depletion, overpopulation, and nuclear proliferation, neither love nor reason alone are enough. Only a successful fusion of the two can ensure humanity's survival.During her long life, Erika Erdmann worked and corresponded with many of the world's top thinkers and researchers in the areas of futurism, neuroscience, and evolutionary theory. For more than a decade she served as Nobel laureate Roger Sperry's library researcher. She also carried out an extensive survey of attitudes toward the future among leading North American figures in the media, academe, and religion. Equally importantly, Erdmann's own life experiences informed her perspective on human nature. Coming of age in Hitler's Germany, caught up with her young family in the chaos of Europe following the Second World War, and finally retiring with her husband to a windswept point overlooking the Atlantic, Erdmann saw firsthand human nature at both its best and worst. Forging a Human Future, her final book, draws on a lifetime of experiences to create an exciting, sometimes troubling, but in the end hopeful view of the human prospect.

Erika Erdmann was born in Germany on 16 January 1919. Her father, Edmund Altenkirch, was an internationally known scientist whose work in thermodynamics resulted in important advances in the areas of heating and refrigeration technologies, including research that contributed to the development of the heat pump. Erdmann credited her father for instilling in her a thorough understanding of the scientific method and an equally deep love for humanity. To avoid her being exposed to Nazi propaganda that was disseminated through the educational system, Erdmann was schooled at home for part of her childhood, and also assisted her father in his research until her marriage to Karl Erdmann in 1942. In 1953 she and her husband emigrated to Canada, where he worked as an engineer for Domtar and they raised their four children. She enrolled in Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in Montreal in 1967 as a mature student, graduating with distinction in 1971. She went on to work as a research assistant for physiological psychologist Roy A. Wise. When her husband retired in 1972, they moved to Nova Scotia, where Erdmann worked for the local public library branch, and where she wrote her first book, Realism and Human Values. She started graduate work at Dalhousie University in 1981, concentrating on the relationship between science and human values, especially the work of Roger W. Sperry and Ralph Burhoe. From 1982 to 1990 she served as library research assistant for Roger Sperry at the California Institute of Technology; during that time she also completed her master’s and doctoral degrees, and published Beyond a World Divided. In 1989 she founded the quarterly journal Humankind Advancing, and in 2000 published a second book on Sperry’s work, A Mind for Tomorrow. Erdmann continued to live and work in Lockeport, Nova Scotia, following the death of her husband Karl, until her own death in 2006.