Laws of Science and Laws of Nature in an Evolutionary Knowledge Ecology

Book chapter, 2019

This chapter presents an evolutionary ecological approach in which human knowledge is studied as the ecology of interacting datainformation-knowledge systems developing in time as a consequence of incessant learning from interactions with the environment on a variety of levels of organization. Within the framework of evolving knowledge ecology, we address Laws of Nature and how they relate to Laws of Science with examples of taxonomies as open-ended relation-based Laws of Science. Dynamical processes in the ecology of knowledge are observed in real/actual time as well as in evolutionary time. The creative nature of sciences is found in its generative principles, mutual interactions between sciences and in their interactions with other knowledge fields. As an illustration of an interdisciplinary knowledge production approach, an info-computational framework is presented with the unconventional notion of computation as natural information processing.