What is “Earth Centrism”?

edited November 5, 2021

The Earth Centrist’s perspective acknowledges that Earth; her material constituents and physical processes, unfolding one day at a time, are our fundamental touchstone with reality.  We acknowledge Earth and glory in understanding her pageant of Evolution and appreciating how that pageant is reflected within our own bodies. 

We find justification in the physical fact that humans were created out of Earth's processes. 

Science shows us that we belong to the mammalian branch of one of Earth’s amazing animal kingdoms.  Yet, it’s undeniable that something quite unique happened around six million years ago when certain apes took a wild improbable evolutionary turn.

By and by, besides the marvel of our two hands, we developed two feet and legs that could stand tall or run for hours and a growing brain that learned rapidly and remembered. 

During this period our brain physically morphed in some significant ways that enabled it to host a profound leap in cognitive information processing, storage and retrieval ability. 

On the outside hominids learned to make tools, hunt, fish, and select plants, plus they mastered fire for cooking and better living.

On the inside our brains were growing and benefiting from the new super nourishment while human curiosity and adventures started filling and stretching our Mindscapes with experiences and knowledge beyond anything the "natural" physical Earth ever knew.

By Mindscape, I mean the product of all that our body/brain perceives and processes, which of course, evolutionarily speaking, was dependent on our brain’s hardware keeping pace with and driving the ever increasing volume of information and thoughts.

While the human mind and spirit seem ineffable mysteries, they are also of tremendous consequence and real-world physical power.  They drove our growing ability to study and manipulate our world; to communicate and record our experiences; and to formulate explanations for a world full of mysteries, threats and wonders.

People learned to think and gossip and paint pictures upon the canvas of cave walls, and even better, upon the canvas of each other’s imaginations.  We’ve been adding to our mind’s awareness and complexity ever since.

Can you trust Frontiers in Psychology research papers? Student's Resource Guide.

"... Such thoughts got me to wondering about Frontiers in Psychology which is part of the Frontiers’ group of Open Access Publisher and Open Science Platform journals.  

Doing some research it didn’t take long to realize they are another example of the devil being in the details of a noble effort when dedication to earning profits and bonuses gets prioritized above meeting their organization’s stated mission.  Something that seems to be more common than not. ..."

Trust, but verify, and keep that salt shaker handy.  

Or, put another way, caveat emptor and hone your critical thinking skills.

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Students’ Resource

Introduction to Predatory Scientific Journals

(selections from the following articles are under the fold)

Predatory publications in evidence syntheses

J Med Libr Assoc. 2019 Jan; 107(1): 57–61.

How do journals in the Frontiers series have such a (relatively) high impact factor?   

@Reddit_U.Lamaksha

My collapse of confidence in Frontiers journals

Posted by deevybee , June 7, 2015

Why I do not trust Frontiers journals, especially not @FrontDigitalHum

Melissa Terras - July 21, 2015

Backlash after Frontiers journals added to list of questionable publishers

Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato, October 23, 2015

Is Frontiers a potential predatory publisher?

Leonid Schneider  - October 28, 2015

Is Frontiers in Trouble?

MICAH, January 15, 2016

What I learned from predatory publishers, by Jeffrey Beall

Jeffrey Beall - June 2017 - BiochemiaMedica

Frontiers: vanquishers of Beall, publishers of bunk

Leonid Schneider, September 18, 2017

Why Beall’s blacklist of predatory journals died

Paul Basken, The Chronicle of Higher Education,  September 22, 2017

Is Frontiers Media a Predatory Publisher?

DH Kaye - December 20, 2017- Flaky Academic Journals

Frontiers 2020: 1/3 of journals increase prices 45x inflation rate

Heather Morrison, June 2020, SustainingKnowledgeCommons.org

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Editorial: Where is scientific publishing heading?

Jens Nielsen, November 2017, https://doi.org/10.1093/femsyr/fox075

Staggeringly profitable scientific publishing bad for science?

Stephen Buranyi - June 27, 2017 - TheGuardian.com

There are new frontiers for academic publishing but scholarly associations and faculty must seize the opportunities

August 24, 2017 - London School of Economics and Political Science

Vanity and predatory academic publishers are corrupting the pursuit of knowledge

Michael J. I. Brown, August 2, 2015, TheConversation.com

How the open access model hurts academics in poorer countries

Brenda Wingfield, Bob Millar,  April 10, 2019, TheConversation.com

Increasing open access publications serves publishers’ commercial interests

Shaun Khoo, June 16, 2019, TheConversation.com

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Reading through Hoffman’s Frontiers in Psychology 2014 paper it occurred to me the published journal article helped lay the foundation for his claim to scientific legitimacy and ultimately his book “The Case Against Reality - Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes.”  

That had me thinking about the scientific process and these philosophical musings that Hoffman sculpted into this paper that makes no scientific case against reality and “Physicalism,” despite his bold, yet hollow, claim. 

Instead, the authors rely on rhetorical fancy dancing to simply dismiss realism outright, along with enlisting mathematical sleight of hand to conjure all pervading “conscious agents” that he suggests does all of our perceiving and thinking for us.  

It begs the question, who would publish such dressed up pipe dreaming as a scientific journal worthy science paper?  

Then I remembered, this was “Frontiers of Psychology” - A pay to publish journal dedicated to psychology.  In other words, we're back to priorities and the pursuit of profits.

Don’t get me wrong, psychology and philosophy are fine and good for what they are, but objects of our mind is not the point here.  Hoffman dismisses spacetime and physical reality as we understand it - that's going over the edge and deserves being called out. 

Hoffman's paper dismisses scientific realism and physicalism, the stuff of natural sciences, Earth sciences, but he does so in a journal dedicated to the study of our mind and thoughts.  

That is, our Human Mindscape, a soft science full of competing lines are arguments based on ideas and conviction, driven by ego, and resulting in endlessly dog-chasing-tail debates over inventive word games.  Seldom getting anywhere.  About as soft a science as there is.  (Yes, rather melodramatic, but so is the situation, when observed from the outside looking in.)

Hoffman's stunt is worth calling out as scientifically sleazy behavior - rather than being heralded as 'provocative, worth reading, even if far fetched.'  What makes it worth reading?  What sort of clarity does it offer?

I myself am baffled at why anyone would want to tell people to imagine that spacetime is doomed and that the structure of our day to day world isn't at all what it seems.  

There's something nasty, disrespectful, predatory even, cynically taking advantage of the under-informed and gullible - filling their heads with utter nonsense, when there's so much about our real world that people ought to be learning about and opening up their eyes and minds to.  

Willful ignorance, along with belligerent ignorance, is a national menace that has received a free pass for way too long.  This "Case Against Reality," and such, is where the disconnect begins, destroying our own government and life support system is where it leads.   

A stand for honesty and facing down to Earth physical facts and the 'laws of nature' needs to be made.  

My point is that Hoffman's thesis has little, if anything, to do with serious natural sciences and the physical reality we are embedded within.  Instead, he dismisses it and by extension realistically appreciating evolution with entertaining alacrity.

Such thoughts got me to wondering about Frontiers in Psychology which is part of the Frontiers’ group of Open Access Publisher and Open Science Platform journals.  

Doing some research it didn’t take long to realize they are another example of the devil being in the details of a noble effort when dedication to earning profits and bonuses gets prioritized above meeting their organization’s stated mission.  Something that seems to be more common than not.  

Evolution is not a process. Evolution is a result.

 Looking at it from a slightly different perspective:

Evolution is Time driving Matter forward.

From the cosmic perspective of some 14 billions years,

Evolution has no intent, it has matter, time, motion, outcomes.

An under appreciated analogy for “Evolution,” is to recognize that “Evolution” is a result of time’s relentless forward momentum.

Time is motion.

The sum total of human knowledge shows us with overwhelming consilience that our “Reality” started at what’s been coined the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago, when massive pure energy was released to create our Universe.

It’s time/motion that pushed this primal energy to coalesce into bundles such as quarks, and it’s time that drove the universe to expand and cool.  It’s time/motion that saw atoms and molecules form.

Time/motion/gravity is what brought vast clouds of atomic, molecular dust together into swirling nurseries for stars to be formed, only to run through their life cycles.  Some dying stars exploded and producing all the elements heavier than iron.  Time/motion/gravity is what sweeps together those remnants into new stars and planets.

Here in our corner of the Universe, conditions were promising for something special to happen and it did.  It’s time/motion/gravity with sunshine and radioactivity that created Earth’s geological turmoil which is the source of life

Time married Earth’s geology with biology and it has driven all the changes since.  One second, minute, day, season at a time.  Resulting in folds within folds of cumulative harmonic complexity flowing down the cascade of time.