The General Evolution Research Group emerged autopoetically from various small groups involving Ervin Laszlo in Budapest, Vienna, and Santa Cruz. It was in Santa Cruz in 1985 that I first met Laszlo, along with David Loye and Riane Eisler, and we shared our ideas to put chaos and evolutionary theory to work on world problems.

Soon after the formation of this group a meeting was organized by Ervin Laszlo and the late Jonas Salk at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. Salk, a medical doctor and researcher, had been focused on the population explosion for many years. He told us: *As a doctor, when I see something wrong, my instinct is to fix it.: In the context of the population explosion and other related global and environmental problems of the world problematique, *to fix it: means an intervention. That is, something radical, revolutionary, provocative, and probably risky must be done. It takes a lot of hubris to plan and execute an untested social intervention. The working group could not agree on a radical strategy with Dr. Salk. In the cafes of La Jolla after this meeting, the working group named itself the General Evolution Research Group, and turned in the safer direction of academic research and publication.

Soon we acquired an indispensable window for publication. Talks between Laszlo and Gordon and Breach, publishers of the Journal of World Futures, resulted in a change of name and scope, and the new journal World Futures: the Journal of General Evolution Research was born, Those of us who had gathered in La Jolla became is editorial board. Since then, this journal has provided us and all others similarly interested in a futures-oriented evolutionary theory with the publication channel so crucial to intellectual advancement. Over the past decade, under Laszlo's leadership, GERG has expanded to include scholars from Russia and China, as well as the European countries and the USA. Many articles and books have been published under the GERG umbrella, and GERG meetings in Bologna, Florence, Vienna, and other European cities have advanced the GERG agenda. At some point an informal pact was agreed to identify some of our individual books, in the front matter, as *A Catalyst Book of the General Evolution Research Group.: Two examples of this are The Chalice and the Blade, by Riane Eisler, and my Chaos, Gaia, Eros.