About the blogger

My name is Brock Haussamen. I live in New Jersey and taught English at a community college for nearly four decades. I have family and close friends here in the state.

Since retiring in 2006, I’ve been active in community assistance, serving at different times as a mentor, a financial coach, and as a volunteer with Reach Out and Read.

All along, I’ve been facing the questions that catch up with most of us: How will I face death? What is life itself? What do I believe in? What answers can I find in nature itself? Scientists’ descriptions of how living things work and how we evolved made sense to me even when I was young, but I could not at first put those descriptions together with the questions that grow louder as we age. Gradually, I’ve been coming to see how the history of life over 3.8 billion years stands inside and throughout my being and the being of others. That is the subject of this blog.

12 thoughts on “About the blogger”

  1. I have been reading your blog over the last couple of weeks. What is the meaning of life? How is my life span of 80-90 years related to the 3.8 billion year history of life on earth? Asking such questions and trying to find naturalistic answers is the most important thing one can do in life. Thank you.

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  2. Are you familiar with Stuart Kauffman book, The Order of Life (1993). I believe it is in that he talks about democracy and living organization, a kind of self-organization that along with far-from equilibrium dynamical systems and Darwin’s natural selection abets life. I became familiar with him through the Santa Fe Institute and proponents of complexity theory. Check it out if you haven’t already. It’s very inspirational, and inspired by own dissertation theory about ritual behavior.

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  3. I want to suggest a milestone in evolutionary cooperation that I think you missed in the “Finding” essay, perhaps the most important one: the eukaryotic revolution, in which some early bacterial cells took up residence *inside* the bodies of others, making possible sub-cellular organelles. This was repeated on a macro scale by multi-cellularism. The eukaryotic advance seems so unlikely to me, so ridiculously counter-intuitive, that I speculate it is the “great filter” that the SETI folks speak of. The ultimate Black Swan event.

    Loving your work, Brock. Welcome to RNA.

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  4. Thanks so much for your blog. Looking forward to reading in depth. I am a young senior who has more recently made major changes to my beliefs, in part influenced by the many wonderful people like you who are giving the world much-needed accuracy, and dialog, about what this whole wild thing called life is really all about. I am in the RNA google group, but too chicken, and intimidated, to write anything as yet. I don’t have a science background, nor a college education. Darn! Wish that part of my life had worked out better, but it didn’t. So I much appreciate the higher knowledge that you and others are providing.Thank you, Brock!

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  5. Lianne, I’m glad you have found the blog helpful. That means a lot. I hope you’ll consider writing about your own observations of the natural world and how they influence your beliefs. Your thoughts may be more meaningful to others than you expect. Thanks again.

    Brock

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