text: Underlying Patterns of the Universe, Tyler Volk, Professor Emeritus of Biology & Environmental Studies. Can we correct course by getting a new view of big picture, one that hints at a new story about our world and our true place in it? What new hope can we find in a Universe on an evolutionary mission? How big is the big picture — one that uses the same evolutionary forces to shape, guide, nudge, and challenge us, along with all Life, along with the very fabric of the cosmos? Science helps us see farther and deeper, and Tyler Volk has woven the pieces from several disciplines into a roadmap of the greater whole.
  “Our world is nested, both physically and socially,” he writes, “and at each level we find innovations that are necessary for the next. Consider: atoms combine to form molecules, molecules combine to form single-celled organisms; when people come together, they build societies. What can we say about this beautifully complex whole? How does one stage shape another, and what can we learn about human existence through understanding an enlarged field of creation and being?”
  Tyler Volk’s books include Metapatterns, Quarks to Culture and Gaia’s Body. An Emeritus Professor of Biology, and the Department of Environmental Studies he co-founded at New York University, traces the patterns that shape the grand evolutionary journey from the Big Bang to our moment in time.