Ah, we made it. Just. Thanks to all those who have heaped praise upon Prescience in the last couple of years and thanks also to the latest contributors (G.I.A. agents Scooby Finch, Natasha Myers, Alex Zuckrow and Professor Pan - you shirley know who you are). Thanks to Bruce Eisner for giving Prescience a new home on his illustrious Island and thanks to Colin Angus of the Shamen for having originally supported this cyberspatial venture within the warm and curiously benign confines of Nemeton

This all-new version of Prescience is, of course, still full of leading edge ideas and no-nonsense paradigm shifting literary devices. You want smart negentropy bombs, we got arrays and arrays. You want strong psychoactive rhetoric, we're loaded. You want a cure for reductionism, we got the new vaccination. Yes indeedy fellow hominids, we still aim to smash the conceptual walls which keep us from apprehending the very great Mystery that is life. As the birds on Aldous Huxley's Island utopia did continually sing: "Wake Up!"

One inexpensive way to see the world anew is to consider the notion of Natural Intelligence, a notion championed in the last two issues of Prescience and which will continue to be championed as long as Prescience persists. To reiterate, the idea of Natural Intelligence holds that evolution is an intelligent process, that Nature - the source of evolution - be both an intelligent and an intelligence-making system. This intelligence, whilst being described by mainstream science as the process of evolution and the biological products thereof, is nonetheless cunningly kicked out of the paradigmatic picture, leaving evolution as 'merely' a process which just happens to be able to achieve remarkable results.

Yet evolution is an intelligent process by virtue of the incontrovertible fact that all species of organism represent learned ways of being in the world. In other words, the nifty biological structure and biological functioning of any organism are nothing less than embodied intelligence that has been naturally attained. This means that as evolution proceeds, so too does biologically-embodied learning proceed such that life gets smarter and smarter, more and more complex, more and more sensitive and more and more able to process and integrate information. Hence, after 3 and a half billion years of this evolutionary learning process we find organisms capable of stunning multicellular orchestration, photosynthesis, digestion, breathing, flight, swimming, long-distance navigation, hunting, social behaviour, communication, and so on.

In each case, the gradual learning achieved by evolution becomes embodied within biological structure and biological behaviour, written down in enduring and heritable digital DNA code just as human learning becomes written down in the enduring and reproducible form of writing. In each case learning and intelligence are interwoven processes.

In short, the relentlessly reiterative process of evolution works wonders and is a sure-fire way of generating intelligent structure and intelligent function. Indeed, evolution fashioned the human cortex, that most complex and convoluted of organs which is, even now, bound up with your reading of these words. And all this - all these fruits of evolution which will keep biologists in employment forever - all this is an expressed potential of Nature. One suspects then that as Natural Intelligence becomes appreciated and acknowledged then perhaps the greatest paradigm shift of all will manifest itself within the collective human psyche.

But enough of futurity, what do we have for you right now? Peruse the extensive contents and check it all out. And spread the word. Prescience. By order of the G.I.A. Nuff said.

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