Joseph Zeller

Contemporary societies exhibit increasing fragmentation despite unprecedented capacities for communication and technological coordination. This paper argues that such fragmentation emerges from a widening tension between escalating communicative complexity and the declining coherence of inherited symbolic systems. Drawing upon systems theory, media theory, sociology, and civilisational analysis, it develops an evolutionary-cultural framework in which meaning systems function as adaptive coordination architectures that stabilise large-scale cooperation under conditions of rising complexity. Postmodernism correctly identified the instability of grand narratives within advanced communicative societies, yet offered comparatively little account of how coherence can persist once shared symbolic frameworks weaken. Under conditions of digital hyperconnectivity and artificial intelligence, this tension intensifies further as communicative environments outpace many of the adaptive assumptions under which existing cultural systems evolved. The paper proposes an evolutionary culturalism in which cultures continuously reorganise in response to changing communicative and institutional pressures while retaining the integrative functions necessary for civilisational continuity. Under consideration at Theory, Culture & Society (SAGE).

This article argues that recent developments across the evolutionary human sciences provide the basis for a reconstructive approach to culture and meaning after postmodernism. Postmodernism revealed the historical contingency of identity, meaning, and social order, but left comparatively underexplored why certain institutions, norms, and forms of social organization recur across diverse historical and cultural settings. Drawing on evolutionary anthropology, cultural evolution, systems thinking, and the philosophy of biology, the article argues that culture emerges through reciprocal interactions among biological capacities, ecological conditions, and symbolic practices. Institutions and norms are interpreted not as arbitrary inventions or as direct expressions of biology, but as adaptive responses to recurring coordination challenges within complex adaptive systems. Language is similarly reconsidered as an evolved symbolic capacity that enables cooperation, abstraction, and cumulative cultural inheritance rather than as the sole constitutive ground of reality. By situating culture as both historically contingent and evolutionarily conditioned, this reconstructive perspective avoids the opposing pitfalls of radical relativism and biological reductionism. It argues that postmodern critique and the evolutionary human sciences illuminate complementary dimensions of human social life: the former explains contingency, while the latter helps explain recurrence, adaptation, and reconstruction. The article concludes that their integration provides a philosophical framework for understanding how meaning, legitimacy, and institutional order emerge, persist, and adapt within evolving human systems

This paper reinterprets Clausewitz’s concept of the centre of gravity through the lens of thermodynamics and complexity science. It argues that endurance and victory in modern conflict depend on sustaining positive energy surplus across material, informational, and cognitive domains. By situating Clausewitz after the Industrial and Information Revolutions, the study translates his Newtonian metaphors of force and balance into the systemic language of flows, feedback, and adaptation. The centre of gravity thus emerges not as a fixed point of strength but as the locus where energy, information, and legitimacy converge to maintain coherence against entropy. Framing war as an energetic process reveals a unifying law of strategy: the actor that sustains the greatest energy surplus retains the capacity to reorganise, endure friction, and prevail. In doing so, the paper restores Clausewitz’s dialectical method to contemporary relevance and offers a framework for analysing power in the age of systems. Note: A revised version of this manuscript is currently under peer review at Defense Studies (Taylor & Francis).

Artificial intelligence is typically framed as “artificial,” as if it were an external artefact or alien replica of human thought. This paper argues instead that AI should be understood as nature reorganising intelligence through new substrates. Drawing on complexity science, evolutionary epistemology, philosophy of technology, and thermodynamic perspectives, the paper situates AI as an evolutionary phase transition arising at thresholds of informational and cognitive saturation. Far from being artificial, AI extends the historical trajectory of reorganisations that include language, writing, printing, and industrial technologies—yet it differs in that it transforms cognition itself rather than its media or energy regimes. The implications are threefold: for philosophy of mind, AI compels recognition of intelligence as distributed and extended; for governance, it demands adaptive, polycentric institutions capable of co-evolution with machine cognition; and for civilisation, it represents a potential catalyst of systemic renewal or collapse. By reframing AI as an evolutionary reorganisation of intelligence, the paper challenges reductive accounts of simulation and substitution and opens new directions for research into the systemic, cultural, and energetic conditions under which intelligence evolves.