Alan Rayner

Alan Rayner FRSA (born Nairobi, Kenya, 1950) is a British biological scientist, ecological philosopher, visual artist, poet and essayist.

Alan Rayner obtained B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Natural Sciences at King's College, Cambridge, and was a reader in biology at the University of Bath from 1985 to 2011. Rayner has published over 160 academic papers, articles and book chapters seven academic texts in the field of biology, and was president of the British Mycological Society in 1998. He has been a BP Venture Research Fellow and a Visiting Miller Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2010.

In 2001, Rayner hosted "The Language of Water", an event combining scientific and artistic material that led to the BBC Radio 4 series Water Story. In 2006 and 2007, he hosted "Unhooked Thinking" part I and II, which examined various aspects of addiction.

In Degrees of Freedom – Living in Dynamic Boundaries (1997), Rayner explains how the interplay between collectivism and individualism is responsible for the rich and varied patterns of life. Using examples from subatomic to galactic scales, the book counterbalances the gene-centered view of evolution by identifying the dynamic pattern generating processes that underlie the diversity of living forms and behaviors. In The Origin of Life Patterns – In the Mutual Inclusion of Space in Flux (2017), Rayner further articulates the significance of recurrent patterns in which life is expressed over diverse scales in natural ecosystems. He elucidates that the mutual inclusion of receptive space and informational flux in all distinguishable local phenomena enables evolutionary diversification to be understood as a fluid-dynamic exploration of renewing possibility, not an eliminative ‘survival of the fittest’.

Rayner has made significant contributions to the fields of mycology, evolutionary ecology, natural flow geometry, cultural diversity and natural philosophy. He is perhaps best known for his pioneering work detailing how varied patterns of structure, function and relationship emerge and co-evolve over nested scales of organization in living systems. He calls this awareness ‘Natural Inclusion’ as the evolutionary process through which all natural substance comes into being and diversifies as flow-forms – mutual inclusions of void space and mobile energy in receptive-responsive relationship. Rayner describes Natural Inclusion as a fundamental evolutionary process, evident from our actual life experience, which both inverts and radically expands beyond Darwin’s abstract concept of natural selection.

Career

Early Life

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Rayner is the son of the former Deputy Mayor of Nairobi and Plant Pathologist, working on coffee rust and coffee berry diseases. In 1958, the family moved to London. During his years in Kenya, Alan received little schooling, but with the help of his sister learned the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic.

Education

Alan Rayner’s early research focused on the interaction of fungi and natural woody substrata such as bark, stumps and branches. He continued to study the evolutionary biology, ecology and physiology of fungal mycelium for several decades publishing dozens of academic papers. Alan’s extensive research into the relationships between various living systems led to the realization that natural boundaries of real organisms, populations and communities vary in permeability, deformability and contiguity. After struggling to fit experimental results into the rigid frameworks of natural selection and abstract reductionism, he developed a new evolutionary understanding which incorporated the receptive presence of space in favor of its exclusion. This receptive space is what Rayner initially referred to as ‘selection vacuum’ and ‘dynamic niche’ but has since been incorporated into a more thorough concept of natural inclusion.

Teaching

Dr. Rayner was a reader at the University of bath from 1985 to 2011. He presented a trans-disciplinary course, entitled ‘Life, Environment & People’ at the University of Bath, United Kingdom, from 2001 - 2011. The course was available to final year undergraduate students studying for degrees in biological sciences, natural sciences, management and psychology and encouraged intellectual discernment, emotional awareness, imaginative enquiry and a participatory learning process that is receptive and responsive to diverse viewpoints and human qualities.

Work

Natural Inclusion

Natural Inclusion is a way of understanding evolutionary becoming as a process of cumulative energetic transformation or natural energy flow. It applies to all scales of natural organization, from sub-atomic to cosmic, including biological evolution. It arises from a core philosophical awareness of 'Natural Inclusionality', which recognizes that all form is flow-form, an energetic configuration of space. This departs from definitive rationality in two fundamental ways. Firstly, natural boundaries are acknowledged to be intrinsically energetic 'dynamic interfacings' between distinct localities, not the 'inert limits' of discrete objects. Secondly, it is recognized that these natural boundaries can only be dynamic through the inclusion of space as infinite, intangible, frictionless presence. Correspondingly, natural inclusion may be described as the co-creative, fluid dynamic transformation of all through all in receptive spatial context.

An understanding of Natural Inclusionality can be gained from a wide variety of different viewpoints: philosophical, scientific, technological, mathematical, ecological, theological, artistical, educational, sociological, political, psychological, linguistic. By the same token, natural inclusionality has profound implications for a very wide variety of human endeavors and offers hope for resolution of some of the most intractable human problems and challenges, which arise directly or indirectly from definitive rationality and that for thousands of years have resulted in profound conflict and suffering.

Natural inclusion recognizes that there are two basic kinds of presence in Nature that must include each other.

Receptive Space

Naturally occurring emptiness everywhere that is not a substance but invites energy to inhabit it with substance. It is motionless, frictionless, and hence provides freedom for movement. Whether viewing from outside-in or inside-out the distinguishable boundary of any natural form, it is impossible to reach a limit where space ceases to exist. Hence it is truly infinite presence.

Responsive Energy

Continuously occurring natural motion that circulates in local substance as matter and pulses as radiation. It is informative, intrinsically mobile flux that enlivens space.

Flow Geometry

Mathematical approach that incorporates the unlimited emptiness of receptive space and intrinsic informative flux of life, offering more realistic numerical and geometric representations of natural expressions of energy and matter, called ‘flow-forms’. The resultant Flow Geometry accounts for all discernable natural patterns of life as expressions of the empty receptivity of space and informative flux of energy. This natural geometry is referred to as ‘place-time’. A basic principle of this geometry is that energy naturally circulates around local, zero-point centers of space, creating residential flow-forms that resist movement out of place, and pulses along linear trajectories from one locality to another, creating communication channels and travelling flow-forms. The inclusive relationship between space, energy and material inertia produces and modifies natural currents, giving rise to myriad variations upon a theme, in the same way the pooling and flow of water both shapes and is shaped by variably resistive landscape.

Natural ‘space’ is an intangible occurrence of receptive stillness (darkness/transparency) – not measurable distance.

Natural ‘time’ is an intangible occurrence of continuous motion (~light/energy) – not measurable duration.

Natural substance (~matter) is a tangible local and temporary expression of receptive-responsive relationship between intangible space and intangible time resulting in ‘surface tension’ of varying intensity in solid, liquid, gas and plasma form.

Painting

Alan began experimenting with oil painting while studying Natural Sciences at King’s College, Cambridge. His earliest works feature imaginary scenes inspired by natural forms that evoke a sense of energetic yearning for freedom and guidance by integrating fluid movements, stimulating colors, and varied perceptual representations of familiar figures. (10) These early paintings symbolize the contrast between Alan’s world view as a playful child growing up in Nairobi and the objectivistic world view confronting him as an adult working in academia.

Around the turn of the millennium, Rayner began an intense period of painting which coincided with his developing recognition of Natural Inclusion. These images maintain the colorful, technically unrefined, symbolic style of previous works while further expressing his naturally inclusional perceptions of receptive space and dynamic informational boundaries. Creatively combining informational rigidity and spatial relaxation, Alan’s paintings begin to communicate the varying degrees of fluidity amongst all living beings.

More recently, Rayner has been experimenting with different artistic media and surfaces bringing out reciprocal relationships between figure and ground. He has begun to depict in his paintings the sharp contrast between rigidly static freeze-frame geometry and fluidly dynamic flow geometry in both colorful and muted tones. Furthermore, Alan has incorporated ironic and paradoxical narratives within his paintings for the viewer to ponder.

Poetry

Dr. Rayner has been writing poetry as a way of bridging what we can see analytically and describe verbally with what we can feel intuitively but cannot articulate in straightforward language.