Dr. Peter Corning

Latest Posts in Dr. Peter Corning

October 2025 Magazine

Our feature this month is a quick primer on climate change. Warnings about climate change are not new. The article Climate Change is Real distinguishes what is real from what is not. Barbara Lloyd McMichael writes about the health impacts on the firefighters who are working in hellish conditions to contain massive wildfires. In War and Peace, Annie Searle writes about the first stage of the Gaza Agreement, and the award of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. This month we also offer you three book reviews with environmental themes. Our special section is a roundup of essays about the wonder of trees. Dr. Peter Corning offers a fresh look at Evolution “On Purpose,” by examining the living organisms that determine the course of evolutionary history. –Patricia Vaccarino

 


Evolution "On Purpose": Teleonomy in Living Systems

In this volume, a number of biologists and philosophers of science, greatly expand on the thesis that “teleonomy” (“internal” purposiveness and goal-directedness) is a unique and important property of living organisms and that it has exerted a major influence over the course of evolutionary history. 


Global Governance: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

 We need global governance. The idea of world government is hardly new, of course.  It’s an enduring dream that can be traced back at least to Bronze Age Egypt and the ancient Chinese Emperors. In the modern era, it has been espoused by many prominent people. Both the League of Nations and the United Nations, despite their limitations, were also incremental steps in this direction.  However, in recent decades the traditional idea of a top-down world government has largely been replaced by the more complex, polycentric, democratic vision of “global governance” – a global system of limited self-governing regimes and cooperative action with respect to specific transnational problems and domains, rather than an overarching, unified, all-powerful political authority.

 


January 2025 Magazine

In our cover story this month, Barbara Lloyd McMichael writes about H. Morgan Hicks, the owner of a yarn shop in Des Moines, Washington. In Toward a New Social Contract for Our Endangered Species, Dr. Peter A. Corning argues that we are on a road to collective self-destruction unless we make a radical course change. Annie Searle takes a look at all of the fires that are burning in her article The Fire This Time. My essay, It’s Too Bad, Tommy Wooten, is about a Yonkers teen who died long ago, tragically and foolishly. Profound, heroic, or tragic, there is more than one way to make your mark in life. – Patricia Vaccarino


Toward a New Social Contract for Our Endangered Species

Accelerating climate change, and an array of other serious global problems and conflicts, prompting some theorists to warn of a “societal collapse”, suggest that the time has come for a new, global social contract, including what I am calling a “global governance initiative.”  Here is a brief summary of this situation, and of my prescription.