After checking on whether it would pose a conflict of interest and deciding that it would not, I recently went ahead and made some substantial revisions to Patrick Gunkel’s Wikipedia page.
I wasn’t citing my own work, but sources I’ve discovered during the past few years of research.
A much more robust Wikipedia entry on Gunkel, including his picture and other details I haven’t written about yet in this newsletter, is the end result.
And though I don’t see myself as being finished with additional updates, what came up emotionally during my effort was an incredible amount of frustration at those who should have been doing this all along—people who supposedly took it upon themselves to protect Gunkel’s legacy but in reality have done jack shit since he passed away in 2017.
Now, I’m not going to name names.
Not yet, anyway.
But I do think it’s worth recognizing that much of my effort in researching and writing about Gunkel has been driven by fanatical sense of injustice that almost nobody has been doing anything to move the needle forward on this man’s incredible legacy of ideas.
Why did it take me, an outsider to Gunkel’s life, to come knocking on doors and demanding answers?
Why did I have to get into a flame war with a bunch of Czech academics because they included the bizarre assertion that Buckminster Fuller was the founder of ideonomy in a 2024 peer-reviewed academic paper?
Why do people learn about Gunkel randomly or accidentally, become fascinated with him, and then find themselves basically unable to do anything else because there’s nobody actively working to preserve his legacy?
My Own Interests
I never knew Gunkel personally, but I did see him riding his bike one day with Tatiana, his second Turkish Van cat, perched in the basket. This was in my hometown of Falmouth, Massachusetts, where Gunkel was a well-known character.
For years I had Gunkel in the back of my mind.
Then, when ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, I immediately started thinking about him intensively.
Yes, I was a bit naivë to take the only person I knew who did artificial intelligence research and assume he would be part of every headline.
But the more I looked back over what I’d learned about Gunkel, the more I realized the omission actually was a serious mistake.
I wasn’t the only who was making this connection either.
On a Facebook message board for Falmouth residents, others were also making the connection, as these posts clearly demonstrate:
Source: Facebook Group.
Why was nobody in the field of artificial intelligence raising their hand and saying, “Wait a minute. Gunkel was talking about a science we could create using artificial intelligence way back in the 1980s.”
One simple reason is that many of Gunkel’s contacts in the field of AI—people like Marvin Minsky—had died by the time ChatGPT came out.
Others, like Edward Fredkin, died soon afterwards.
As for others who knew about Gunkel, I can only guess how difficult it must be in academia to start a conversation about something nobody else is already discussing.
Of course, the possibility remains that even very smart people at MIT didn’t understand Gunkel nearly so well as they could have if they’d simply paid more attention.
Gunkel himself had a number of communication problems that perpetually dogged him and his ability to talk about ideonomy.
And yet out all of the unforced errors, missed opportunities, and communications breakdowns related to Gunkel, there was one notable exception.
The Biologist and the Ideonomist
In April of 1984, Gunkel met a graduate student in biology named Betsey Dexter Dyer at a fancy academic talk in Cambridge known as the Philomorphs.
Dyer was presenting on work she was doing at the lab of the well-known evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis at nearby Boston University.
Gunkel was immediately smitten.
Though Dyer put Gunkel firmly in the friend zone, for the next 30-odd years, the two remained friends and correspondents.
When Gunkel got his first Turkish Van cat, Sinbad, he proudly mailed Dyer a photograph—and then hilariously harassed her to return it after two months had passed.
Note: I have the right to disseminate this material. It may not be copied, stored, reproduced, or disseminated without express written permission. However, excerpts can and should be used for scholarly purposes.
Dyer encouraged Gunkel, learned from him, and did what she could to help him overcome the various obstacles—many of them self-created—that Gunkel tended to face as a neurodivergent savant.
At a time when few academics would touch Gunkel with a ten-foot pole, Professor Dyer saw the importance of Gunkel’s ideas and worked to incorporate them into her research.
She even cited Gunkel and ideonomy in a number of her scholarly publications, including her 1989 publication in the American Zoologist journal, “Symbiosis and Organismal Boundaries.”
Dyer is responsible for establishing one of the only “in situ” academic paper trails for Gunkel’s science of ideas.
Dyer wrote a recommendation letter for Gunkel in trying to get his ideonomy manuscript published.1
And when Gunkel was struggling financially in the early 2000s, Dyer brought him to campus at Wheaton College to talk ideonomy with her students, providing Gunkel with positive feedback afterwards.2
By 2022, herself retired, Dyer approached MIT and opened an archive for Gunkel.
She gave the MIT Distinctive Collections archive all the documents she had, including personal correspondence.
This was what Gunkel had always wanted.
Despite all the turmoil that came with being a friend of Gunkel’s, Professor Dyer still valued him enough as a person to follow through on one of Gunkel’s greatest expressed desires for his legacy after death.
Which Brings Me Back to Wikipedia
Professor Dyer has been an invaluable resource to me throughout the past few years.
And so when she emailed me to ask whether Gunkel’s Wikipedia page could be updated, I felt compelled to jump on it.
Of course it could be!
Beyond the outrage I felt as I worked through Gunkel’s page and did the sort of updates I felt other people should have been doing years ago, I also found myself recalling how important Wikipedia was to a futurist like Gunkel.
Many people don’t know this, but the idea for Wikipedia was first described by H.G. Wells in a 1938 essay collection called “World Brain.”
For Wells, the “World Brain” concept was an electronic encyclopedia accessible by everyone in the world over a computer network.
For years, Gunkel, who was an encyclopedia fanatic, anticipated the creation of this World Brain. In the late 1990s, it arrived to his great delight. He began to become a contributor. And then… well, the predictable thing happened.
According to an interview I conducted with one of Gunkel’s acquaintances, Gunkel got into too many editorial fights on Wikipedia and, as a result, he was banned.
“He had epic battles on Wikipedia where he kept inserting his definitions (corrections) until they had to ban him,” my source wrote.
I lack the electronic research skills to go back in time and try to figure out what Gunkel’s Wikipedia profile was and what sort of edits he was proposing.
But this would be a truly great feat of Gunkel scholarship in the future.
For now, my intention is to safeguard all the gains I’ve made already and focus on those undertakings that have the most impact for the least amount of effort.
Thanks, Professor Dyer, for flagging one such effort in my quest to further legitimize Patrick Gunkel and his science of ideas.
(1) Author’s personal archival research.
(2) Ibid.