This book presents the theory of anticipation, and establishes anticipation of the future as a legitimate topic of research. The book first summarizes the research on anticipation conducted within a range of different disciplines, and describes the connection between the anticipatory point of view and futures studies.

This rare publication continues an exploratory journey in relational biology, a study of biology in terms of the organization of networked connections in living systems. It builds on the author's two earlier monographs which looked at the epistemology of life and the ontogeny of life. Here the emphasis is on the intangibility of life, that the real nature of living systems is conveyed not by their tangible material basis but by their intangible inherent processes. Relational biology is the approach that hails 'function dictates structure'; it is mathematics decoded into biological...