Rupert Riedl
Encyclopedia
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
n zoologist who made contributions in the fields of:
- Marine biologyMarine biologyMarine biology is the scientific study of organisms in the ocean or other marine or brackish bodies of water. Given that in biology many phyla, families and genera have some species that live in the sea and others that live on land, marine biology classifies species based on the environment rather...
- MorphologyMorphology (biology)In biology, morphology is a branch of bioscience dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features....
- Theory of evolution (a systems approach)
- Evolutionary EpistemologyEvolutionary epistemologyEvolutionary epistemology refers to two distinct topics - on the one hand, the biological evolution of cognitive mechanisms in animals and humans, and on the other hand, a theory in that knowledge itself evolves by natural selection....
- EnvironmentNatural environmentThe natural environment encompasses all living and non-living things occurring naturally on Earth or some region thereof. It is an environment that encompasses the interaction of all living species....
and societySocietyA society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
He was also the Founder President of the Club of Vienna
Club of Vienna
The Club of Vienna is an international association which has 24 members and interested in social, scientific, economic and ecological issues.- Areas of Focus :Particular attention is given to:, retrieved online: 2009-05-23...
.
Rupert Riedl was a scientist with broad interests, whose influence in epistemology grounded in evolutionary theory was notable, although less in English-speaking circles than in German or even Spanish speaking ones. His 1984 work, Biology of Knowledge: The evolutionary basis of reason examined cognitive abilities and the increasing complexity of biological diversification over the immense periods of evolutionary time.
Riedl built upon the work of the Viennese school of thought initially typified by Konrad Lorenz
Konrad Lorenz
Konrad Zacharias Lorenz was an Austrian zoologist, ethologist, and ornithologist. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch...
, and continued today by Gerhard Vollmer
Gerhard Vollmer
Gerhard Vollmer is a German physicist and philosopher. He tries to build bridges between the natural science and the more social or humanistic disciplines. He is perhaps best known for his development of an evolutionary theory of knowledge.-Life:Vollmer studied in Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and...
, Franz Wuketits, and in Spain by Nicanor Ursura, skeptical of German idealism, and nourished by the tradition that produced Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher, noted for his contributions to physics such as the Mach number and the study of shock waves...
, Ludwig Boltzmann
Ludwig Boltzmann
Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann was an Austrian physicist famous for his founding contributions in the fields of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics...
, Erwin Schrödinger
Erwin Schrödinger
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger was an Austrian physicist and theoretical biologist who was one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, and is famed for a number of important contributions to physics, especially the Schrödinger equation, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933...
, Karl Popper
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
, Hans Reichenbach
Hans Reichenbach
Hans Reichenbach was a leading philosopher of science, educator and proponent of logical empiricism...
and Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
.
Konrad Lorenz
Konrad Lorenz
Konrad Zacharias Lorenz was an Austrian zoologist, ethologist, and ornithologist. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch...
believed that the Kantian framework of cognitive concepts such as three dimensional space and time were not fixed but built up over phylogenetic history, potentially subject to further developments. Lorenz’s position, as expanded by Rupert Riedl, attempts to make it easier to assimilate non common sense physical scientific areas such as quantum field theory and string theory.
Riedl drew clear distinctions between the deductive and inductive (non conscious) cognitive processes characteristic of the left and right cerebral hemispheres. His analysis of what he called “the pitfalls of reason” deserves special attention. He, like Lorenz, was concerned with cognitive processes that might endanger the future of civilization.
Riedl had less direct influence on academic philosophy than his profound influence on the thinking of investigators in neuroscience such as Michael Gazzaniga
Michael Gazzaniga
Michael S. Gazzaniga is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he heads the new SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind. He is one of the leading researchers in cognitive neuroscience, the study of the neural basis of mind...
, Antonio Damasio
Antonio Damasio
Antonio Damasio is David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, where he heads USC's Brain and Creativity Institute and Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute. Prior to taking up his posts at USC, in 2005, Damasio was M.W...
, and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Vilayanur Subramanian "Rama" Ramachandran, born 1951, is a neuroscientist known for his work in the fields of behavioral neurology and visual psychophysics...
, whose investigations combine synergistically with those of more physiologically-oriented scientists such as Eric Kandel and Rodolfo Llinás
Rodolfo Llinás
Rodolfo R. Llinás PhD is a neuroscientist. He is presently the Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and Chairman of the department of Physiology & Neuroscience at the NYU School of Medicine...
, as well as computational models that take advantage of the techniques of systems dynamics as practiced by Denis Noble
Denis Noble
Denis Noble CBE FRS FRCP is a British biologist who held the Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at Oxford University from 1984 to 2004 and was appointed Professor Emeritus and co-Director of Computational Physiology. He is one of the pioneers of Systems Biology and developed the...
and P. Read Montague.
Works
- Riedl, R. (1978) Order in living organisms: A systems analysis of evolution. New York: Wiley.
- Riedl, R. (1983) (ed.) Flora und Fauna des Mittelmeeres Hamburg: P. Parey.
- Riedl, R. (1984) Biology of Knowledge: The Evolutionary Basis of Reason, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
- Wagner, G. P. and M. D. Laubichler (2004) "Rupert Riedl and the re-synthesis of evolutionary and developmental biology: body plans and evolvability." J Exp Zool B: Mol Dev Evol. 302B:92-102
External links
- CV at Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition ResearchKonrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition ResearchThe Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research is an international center for advanced studies in theoretical biology. It supports the articulation, analysis, and integration of biological theories and the exploration of their wider scientific and cultural significance...