![]() ![]() There was also the more encompassing theory developed by the 19th century polymath Herbert Spencer, who had posited a universal “law of evolution” that purported to explain the evolutionary trend from energy to life, to mind, to society and, finally, to complex civilizations. In this case, it was not because nobody had ever thought about the question before. For reasons that are frankly obscure to me, the systems science pioneers were very slow to address the question: Why do living systems exist? And why has there been a pronounced evolutionary trend over the past 3.5 billion years or so toward more complex systems? Until quite recently, the systems sciences had a curiously ahistorical world view and seemed uninterested in the problems of phylogeny. Scientific progress often occurs when somebody asks a question that nobody had posed before, or that it perhaps did not appear feasible to study before (or that it was not “politically correct” to study). ![]() And that is where synergy comes into the picture. They never espoused and, indeed, were quite skeptical about the possibility that there would ever be a scientific “theory of everything.” (They were happy to leave such hubris to the well-funded young turks of theoretical physics.) On the other hand, they did hope eventually to develop a taxonomy of system types, and they did not preclude the possibility that there might in due course emerge a theory, or theories relating to some common property or aspect of systems generally, or that there might be general theories about a particular class or type of systemic phenomena. Their objective was to create a science of wholes, a science that would focus on systems and their properties as a complement, not an alternative, to the analytical, “dissectionist” strategies that had come to predominate, and still do, in the “hard” sciences. Miller’s definitive framework (Miller 1995). (Boulding characterized the general systems paradigm as the “skeleton” of a science.) These broadly educated theorists were well aware of the rather significant differences between, say, a solar system, an ecosystem and the living systems that are elucidated in James G. The problem with such a universalistic conceptualization, as the founding fathers well appreciated, was that it most likely precluded any general theory that would be applicable to all systems, so defined (Bertalanffy 1956 Boulding 1956 Ashby 1958 Rapoport 1968).Īccordingly, the founding fathers stressed that the term “general” in general systems theory referred to theories about systems as such. Our starting point is the insight that a fundamental property of the universe is functional relationships involving two or more “objects,” along with the fact that the systems science pioneers of the 1950s were comfortable with using this broad formulation as a generic definition of a “system” (Hall and Fagan 1956). Here I will briefly discuss one aspect of the relationship between the two. Indeed, synergy is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature and human societies alike. Prepared for the International Society for the Systems Sciences, and the Systems Sciences Primer (1996)Īlthough its role is often unappreciated, synergy can be considered one of the core concepts of the systems sciences.
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