Queen's University Belfast

Faculty Member, Biological Sciences

University Lecturer

About

Officially I'm a theoretical ecologist now, but in my head (where it matters, right?) I am a natural philosopher who is interested in what everything really is and how it came to be that way.

Especially I am wondering what exactly and fundamentally is life? How did it get here and why is it like this and not some other way.

Several threads come together in a gradually forming sense of the answer. Life is information, organised in a hierarchy of complex systems; this information can be observed as biodiversity; which is the result of natural selection from, probably, chaotic reordering of coded information in complex systems.

Indeed, it seems everything that exists is so because of the filtering by resonant selection of nonsense (noise) into sense (order) - the whole universe is a self-filtering complex system, building meaningful information. Life is a tremendous elaboration of this cosmological process.

Obviously we are part of all this and we relate to it by a) depending on it for our own life and b) via economically mediated processes: roughly termed ecosystem services. Economic theory and practice suggests we consciously relate to the rest of the universe through utility, measured by value. Thus the question of 'sustainable living' is one of correctly valuing everything that surrounds us. This leads to my interest in value theory - especially the valuation of the quintessence of nature - meaningful information.

To make a practical example of this, I presently look more closely at marine ecosystems - complex webs on which we depend in some rather obvious ways, now being recognised in the so called 'ecosystem approach to fisheries management.