Systems Scientists

"Biological systems are dynamical, not easily predicted, and are creative in many ways... In the old equilibrium worldview, ideas about change were dominated by the action-reaction formula. It was a clockwork world, ultimately predictable in boring ways."

"Life does not depend on the magic of Watson-Crick base pairing or any other specific template-replicating machinery. Life lies ... in the property of catalytic closure among a collection of molecular species"

"A system in which a few things interacting produce tremendously divergent behavior; deterministic chaos; it looks random but its not."

"The famous physicist Wolfgang Pauli is said to have remarked that the deepest pleasure in science comes from finding an instantiation, a home, for some deeply felt, deeply held image."

"The onset of evolutionism brought with it the concept of branching phylogenies. The branching image, so clear and succinct, has come to underlie all our thinking about organisms and evolution."

"It would be a triumph to find universal laws of organization for life, ecosystems, and biospheres. The candidate criticality law is emergent and not reducible to physics alone."

"Living systems exist in the solid regime near the edge of chaos, and natural selection achieves and sustains such a poised state."

"Stephen Jay Gould is extremely bright, inventive. He thoroughly understands paleontology; he thoroughly understands evolutionary biology. He has performed an enormous service in getting people to think about punctuated equilibrium, because you see the process of stasis/sudden change, which is a puzzle. It's the cessation of change for long periods of time. Since you always have mutations, why don't things continue changing? You either have to say that the particular form is highly adapted, optimal, and exists in a stable environment, or you have to be very puzzled. Steve has been enormously important in that sense. Talking with Steve, or listening to him give a talk, is a bit like playing tennis with someone who's better than you are. It makes you play a better game than you can play. For years, Steve has wanted to find, in effect, what accounts for the order in biology, without having to appeal to selection to explain everything—that is, to the evolutionary "just-so stories." You can come up with some cockamamie account about why anything you look at was formed in evolution because it was useful for something. There is no way of checking such things. We're natural allies, because I'm trying to find sources of that natural order without appealing to selection, and yet we all know that selection is important."

"Francisco Varela is amazingly inventive, freewheeling, and creative. There's a lot of depth in what he and Humberto Maturana have said. Conversely, from the point of view of a tied-down molecular biologist, this is all airy-fairy, flaky stuff. Thus there's the mixed response. That part of me that's tough-minded and critical is questioning, but the other part of me has cottoned on to the recent stuff he's doing on self- representation in immune networks. I love it."

"The strange thing about the theory of evolution is that everyone thinks he understands it. But we do not. A biosphere, or an econosphere, self-consistently coconstructs itself according to principles we do not yet fathom."

"Evolution is not just "chance caught on the wing". It is not just a tinkering of the ad hoc, of bricolage, of contraption. It is emergent order honored and honed by selection."

"It is not necessary that a specific set of 2000 enzymes be assembled... Whenever a collection of chemicals contains enough different kinds of molecules, a metabolism will crystallize from the broth."

"You can see these two species coexisting in a long period of stability; then on of the them drops out and all hell breaks loose. Tremendous instability. That's the Soviet Union."

"Artificial Life (``AL or ``Alife) is the name given to a new discipline that studies "natural" life by attempting to recreate biological phenomena from scratch within computers and other "artificial" media. Alife complements the traditional analytic approach of traditional biology with a synthetic approach in which, rather than studying biological phenomena by taking apart living organisms to see how they work, one attempts to put together systems that behave like living organisms."

"By representing themselves as a system [the mass media ] generates boundaries with an inside and an outside that is inaccessible to them. They too reflect [or represent] their outside as public life, so long as specific external relationships, such as to politics or to the advertisers, are not in question."

"The second-order cybernetics worked out by Heinz von Foerster is rightly held to be a constructivist theory, if not an a manifesto for operational constructivism. The reverse doesn't apply, however. Constructivist epistemologies do not necessarily have the rigor of a cybernetics of cybernetics. One can observe cognitions as constructions of an observer, without linking with this the theory that the observing observer observes himself or herself as an observer."

"Niklas Luhmann is remembered as the most important social theorist of the 20th century. Yet in much of the Anglo-Saxon world he is virtually unknown among professional social scientists."

"The effect if not the function of the mass media seems to lie, therefore, in the reproduction of non- transparency through transparency, in the reproduction of non-transparency of effects through transparency of knowledge."

"On Amazon.com, a reader of my book Luhmann Explained wrote "... if your teenager is bad, don’t ground him; make him write an essay on the sociological theory of Niklas Luhmann.” I sympathize with this reader’s point of view. Having read texts by Luhmann for about twenty years, I have increasingly asked myself why, even though I find the theory very appealing, its inventor did not manage to express it in a reasonably enjoyable manner. Sometimes, particularly in his later works, Luhmann’s irony and humor interrupt his otherwise extremely dry, unnecessarily convoluted, poorly structured, highly repetitive, overly long, and aesthetically unpleasing texts."

"Whatever we know about society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media. This is true not only of our knowledge of society but also of our knowledge of nature."

"It had always been clear to me that a thoroughly constructed conceptual theory of society would be much more radical and much more discomforting in its effects than narrowly focused criticisms—criticisms of capitalism for instance— could ever imagine."

"Die folgenden Untersuchungen wagen diesen Übergang zu einem radikal antihumanistischen, einem radikal antiregionalistischen und einem radikal konstruktivistischen Gesellschaftsbegriff."

"We are still spellbound by a tradition that arranged psychological faculties hierarchically, relegating ‘sensuousness’ — that is, perception — to a lower position in comparison to higher, reflective functions of reason and understanding. The most advanced versions of ‘conceptual art’ still follow this tradition. By refusing to base themselves in sensuously perceptible distinctions between works of art and other objects, these works seek to avoid reducing art to the realm of sense perception."

"No matter how abstractly formulated are a general theory of systems, a general theory of evolution and a general theory of communication, all three theoretical components are necessary for the specifically sociological theory of society. They are mutually interdependent."

"Does knowledge rest on construction in the sense that it only functions because the knowing system is operatively closed, therefore: because it can maintain no operative contact with the outside world; and because it therefore remains dependent, for everything that it constructs, on its own distinction between self-reference and allo-reference?"

"Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate."

"The activity of observing establishes a distinction in a space that remains unmarked, the space from which the observer executes the distinction. The observer must employ a distinction in order to generate the difference between unmarked and marked space, and between himself and what he indicates. The whole point of this distinction (its intention) is to mark something as distinct from something else. At the same time, the observer — in drawing a distinction - makes himself visable to others. He betrays his presence - even if a further distinction is required to distinguish him."

"The art system operates on its own terms, but an observer of art can choose many different distinctions to indicate what he observes."

"In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself?"

"Unlike philosophy, art does not search for islands of security from which other experiences can be expelled as fantastic or imaginary, or rejected as a world of secondary qualities or enjoyment, of pleasure or common sense. Art radicalizes the difference between the real and the merely possible in order to show through works of its own that even in the realm of possibility there is order after all. Art opposes, to use a Hegelian formulation, “the prose of the world,” but for precisely this reason it needs this contrast."

"In 1946, a Macy Foundation interdisciplinary conference was organized to use the model provided by "feedback systems," honorifically referred to in earlier conferences as "teleological mechanisms," and later as "cybernetics," with the expectation that this model would provide a group of sciences with useful mathematical tools and, simultaneously, would serve as a form of cross-disciplinary communication. Out of the deliberations of this group came a whole series of fruitful developments of a very high order. Kurt Lewin (who died in 1947) took away from the first meeting the term "feedback". He suggested ways in which group processes, which he and his students were studying in a highly disciplined, rigorous way, could be improved by a "feedback process," as when, for example, a group was periodically given a report on the success or failure of its particular operations."

"If you want truly to understand something, try to change it."

"The study of the conditions for change begins appropriately with an analysis of the conditions for “no change,” that is, for the state of equilibrium."

"Any planned social change will have to consider a multitude of factors characteristic for the particular case. The change may require a more or less unique combination of educational and organizational measures; it may depend upon quite different treatments or Ideology, expectation and organization. Still, certain general formal principles always have to be considered."

"For any type of social management, It is of great practical importance that levels of quasi-stationary equilibria can be changed in either of two ways: by adding forces in the desired direction, or by diminishing opposing forces."

"The survival and development of democracy depends not so much on the development of democratic ideals which are wide-spread and strong. Today, more than ever before, democracy depends upon the development of efficient forms of democratic social management and upon the spreading of the skill in such management to the common man."

"The objective of social change might concern the nutritional standard of consumption, the economic standard of living, the type of group relation, the output of a factory, the productivity of an educational team. It is important that a social standard to be changed does not have the nature of a “thing” but of a “process.”."

"To instigate changes toward democracy a situation has to be created for a certain period where the leader is sufficiently in control to rule out influences he does not want and to manipulate the situation to a sufficient degree. The goal of the democratic leader in this transition period will have to be the same as any good teacher, namely to make himself superfluous, to be replaced by indigenous leaders from the group."

"A successful individual typically sets his next goal somewhat but not too much above his last achievement. In this way he steadily raises his level of aspiration... The unsuccessful individual on the other hand, tends to show one of two reactions: he sets his goal very low, frequently below his past achievement... or he sets his goals far above his abilities."

"An attempt to improve intergroup relations has to face a wide variety of tasks. It deals with problems of attitude and stereotypes in regard to other groups and to one's own group, with problems of development of attitudes and conduct during childhood and adolescence, with problems of housing, and the change of the legal structure of the community; it deals with problems of status and caste, with problems of economic discrimination, with political leadership and with leadership in many aspects of community life. It deals with the small social body of a family, a club or a friendship group, with the larger social body of a school or a school system, with neighborhoods and with social bodies of the size of a community, of the state, a nation and with international problems."

"Planning starts usually with something like a general idea. For one reason or another it seems desirable to reach a certain objective, and how to reach it is frequently not too clear. The first step then is to examine the idea carefully in the light of the means available. Frequently more fact-finding about the situation is required. If this first period of planning is successful, two items emerge: namely, an ‘over-all plan’ of how to reach the objective and secondly, a decision in regard to the first step of action. Usually this planning has also somewhat modified the original idea. The next period is devoted to executing the first step of the original plan."

"A certain area within a channel may function as a “gate”; the constellation of the forces before and after the gate region is decisively different in such a way that the passing or not passing of the unit through the whole channel depends to a high degree upon what happens in the gate region. This holds not only for food channels but also for the travelling of a news item through certain communication channels in a group, for movement of goods, and the social locomotion of individuals in many organizations."

"The second experiment, with four leaders, makes possible a comparison of the authoritarianism and democracy of four different leaders, and the "laissez-faire" method of two different leaders. In two cases it is also possible to compare the same atmosphere, created by two different leaders with the same club. One other type of control seemed very important, the nature of the club activity, and the physical setting..."

"A business man once stated that there is nothing so practical as a good theory."

"One should view the present situation – the status quo – as being maintained by certain conditions or forces. A culture – for instance, the food habits of a certain group at a given time – is not a static affair but a live process like a river which moves but still keeps to a recognizable form...Food habits do not occur in empty space. They are part and parcel of the daily rhythm of being awake and asleep; of being alone and in a group; of earning a living and playing; of being a member of a town, a family, a social class, a religious group . . . in a district with good groceries and restaurants or in an area of poor and irregular food supply. Somehow all these factors affect food habits at any given time. They determine the food habits of a group every day anew just as the amount of water supply and the nature of the river bed determine the flow of the river, its constancy or change."

"The present report is a preliminary summary on one phase of a series of experimental studies of group life which has as its aim a scientific approach to such questions as the following : What underlies such differing patterns of group behavior as rebellion against authority, persecution of a scapegoat, apathetic submissiveness to authoritarian domination, or attack upon an outgroup? How may differences in subgroup structure, group stratification, and potency of ego- centered and group-centered goals be utilized as criteria for predicting the social resultants of different group atmospheres? Is not democratic group life more pleasant, but authoritarianism more efficient?"

"A goal can play an essential role in the psychological situation without being clearly present in consciousness."

"[Life space was defined as] the totality of facts which determine the behavior (B) of an individual (or group/organization) at a certain moment. The life space (L) represents the totality of possible events. The life space includes the person (P) and the environment (E). B = f(L) = f(P.E)"

"The life space... includes both the person and his psychological environment. The task of explaining behavior then becomes identical with (1) finding a scientific representation of the life space (LSp) and (2) determining the function (F) which links the behavior to the life space. This function (F) is what one usually calls a law... The novelist who tells the story behind the behavior and development of an individual gives us detailed data about his parents, his siblings, his character, his intelligence, his occupation, his friends, his status. He gives us these data in their specific interrelation, that is, as part of a total situation. Psychology has to fulfill the same task with scientific instead of poetic means.... The method should be analytical in that the different factors which influence behavior have to be specifically distinguished. In science, these data have also to be represented in their particular setting within the specific situation. A totality of coexisting facts which are conceived of as mutually interdependent is called a field. Psychology has to view the life space, including the person and his environment, as one field."

"[Lewin formally defines a Gestalt as:] a system whose parts are dynamically connected in such a way that a change of one part results in a change of all other parts."