The Science of Synthesis

Exploring the Social Implications of General Systems Theory

Debora Hammond

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781607320708
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Debora Hammond's The Science of Synthesis explores the development of general systems theory and the individuals who gathered together around that idea to form the Society for General Systems Research. In examining the life and work of the SGSR's five founding members-Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Kenneth Boulding, Ralph Gerard, James Grier Miller, and Anatol Rapoport-Hammond traces the emergence of systems ideas across a broad range of disciplines in the mid-twentieth century.

Both metaphor and framework, the systems concept as articulated by its earliest proponents highlights relationship and interconnectedness among the biological, ecological, social, psychological, and technological dimensions of our increasingly complex lives. Seeking to transcend the reductionism and mechanism of classical science-which they saw as limited by its focus on the discrete, component parts of reality-the general systems community hoped to complement this analytic approach with a more holistic orientation. As one of many systems traditions, the general systems group was specifically interested in fostering collaboration and integration among different disciplinary perspectives, with an emphasis on nurturing more participatory and truly democratic forms of social organization.

The Science of Synthesis documents a unique episode in the history of modern thought, one that remains relevant today. This book will be of interest to historians of science, system thinkers, scholars and practicioners in the social sciences, management, organization development and related fields, as well as the general reader interested in the history of ideas that have shaped critical developments in the second half of the twentieth century.

PART I

The Sources of Systems Thinking

TWO

The Science of Life:
Organization in Living Systems

Are there not general principles of stabilization? May not the devises developed in the animal organism for preserving steady states illustrate methods which are used, or which could be used, elsewhere? Might it not be useful to examine other forms of organization—industrial, domestic or social—in the light of the organization of the body?

—Walter Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body¹

My own introduction to the field of systems thinking came about in connection with my search for a “new paradigm”—an alternative to the mechanistic world view that Fritjof Capra had identified as the source of many of our contemporary problems. At first I had expected to focus on twentieth-century developments in physics, such as relativity theory and quantum mechanics, and their theoretical implications in relation to my own quest for a better world. Margaret Wheatley has actually followed a similar path in her discussion of the implications of quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and concepts of self-organization for the way in which we organize and manage our social institutions. In Leadership and the New Science, she suggests that the Newtonian framework for understanding our world has resulted in a focus on control. On the other hand, the flowering of modern science catalyzed by Newton’s work is often associated with the emergence of democratic social movements in the eighteenth century. From this perspective, the “mechanistic paradigm” carries a progressive impulse. Then again, both Carolyn Merchant, in The Death of Nature, and David Kubrin, in “How Sir Isaac Newton Helped Restore Law ‘n’ Order to the West,” have pointed out how the triumph of the mechanistic world view resulted in a more exploitative attitude toward nature (and women) and the suppression of the more radical egalitarian social movements of that period.²

The variety of perspectives on the relationship between theoretical frameworks in science and their social and political implications fascinated me, and in exploring the meaning and significance of mechanism and its alternatives, I ultimately focused on the field of biology. Significantly, the founders of SGSR were also drawn to the systems perspective through their interest in biology and the organizational processes in living systems. Although developments in engineering and management fields are highlighted in the technocratic approach to systems, the emergence of organismic conceptions in biology, psychology, and sociology during the early twentieth century was more important for the evolution of general-systems thought. Of course, biological concepts were interpreted in varying ways within different currents of systems thought, and were often appropriated to reinforce and legitimize managerial applications of systems concepts. Ludwig von Bertalanffy was one of the most influential organismic biologists during the early twentieth century, and his impassioned critique of mechanistic views was linked to his rejection of the “machine view of man” that he saw as inherent in industrial society. On the other hand, Ralph Gerard’s organismic conception of society was rooted in a different tradition and was perhaps more closely aligned with the emerging technocratic order.³

The two main issues confronting theoretical biologists at the turn of the century were (1) the nature of life and the relationship between biological/psychological and physical/chemical phenomena, and (2) the processes of evolution and development. Questions about the nature of life informed the debates between mechanistic and vitalist orientations that focused on the source of organization in living systems and the nature of consciousness. Organismic biology emerged as an attempt to overcome the dichotomy between these two views and to redefine the relationship between the physical and biological sciences, establishing biology as an autonomous science. In contrast to the primarily reductionist orientation of mechanistic models, which sought to explain biological phenomena primarily in terms of physical and chemical reactions at the molecular level, organismic approaches sought to understand living organisms in holistic, dynamic, and interactive terms.

Organismic perspectives emphasize organizing relations and highlight the concept of emergence, the idea that phenomena arising out of the interaction of component parts of a system are more complex than the parts themselves and cannot be explained on the basis of the parts alone. In her discussion of organicism as a new paradigm, Donna Haraway points out the importance of metaphor in the elaboration of new models in science. The metaphor of the organism, central to this new paradigm, highlights the importance of structural coordination as well as the relative autonomy of biology in relation to physics. Ernst Mayr made a similar argument for the autonomy of biology, suggesting that the distinction between the organic and the inorganic is not a question of substance but of organization.⁴

On the other hand, like the systems models that emerged out of organismic biology, organicism was also rooted in analogies between living and nonliving systems. Paul Weiss, whose work shaped the development of Bertalanffy’s thought, applied systems concepts from engineering to problems in embryology. Although critical of organismic models, Michael Ghiselin suggests that analogies between different fields can serve a useful and legitimate function in the evolution of science. He cites Darwin’s work as an example of the transfer of ideas and ways of thinking from one field to another, in applying concepts from geology and economics to an understanding of biological evolution, and suggests that there may be “far greater unity among natural phenomena.” The nature of this unity forms one of the central dilemmas in debates between holistic and reductionist orientations and is a central preoccupation in the evolution of systems theories. Significantly in relation to later critiques, Haraway describes reductionism as an approach based on the assumption of a unified nature, while she suggests that organicists tended to see the world in more pluralistic terms.⁵

A key feature of most organismic models is a rejection of the atomism and reductionism of physics and chemistry. Unlike the vitalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who appealed to immaterial or supernatural forces in their rejection of the mechanistic model, the organicists of the 1920s and 1930s hoped to develop empirically grounded laws to describe the behavior of organisms, shifting the terms of the debate from metaphysical to epistemological grounds. These laws, regarding patterns of integration and organization, would be unique to biology. Two of the earliest organicists, writing in the 1910s, were J. S. Haldane, who was the first to call himself an organicist, and E. S. Russell. Both of them thought that neither vitalism nor mechanism were sufficient to address the problems confronting biology, and believed that the fundamental unit of biology was the whole individual organism. According to Russell, the organismic conception “allows us to look on the living thing as a functional unity . . . and to realize how all its activities . . . subserve in cooperation with one another the primary end of development, maintenance, and reproduction.”⁶

In connection with ensuing efforts to explain the functional unity of living systems in scientific terms, biological research in this tradition focused on the nature and genesis of organic form, in connection with contemporary developments in evolution and embryology. Similarly, gestalt psychology emphasized the perception of form as a holistic and evolutionary process. The most significant contributions to the emergence of systems thought from the organismic tradition were its emphasis on (1) the source of organization in complex systems, (2) the role of information in the maintenance of that organization, and (3) the importance of considering any system in relation to its environment.⁷

Haraway identifies three major lineages of organismic thought in the early twentieth century that are relevant to the emergence of systems ideas. The German-speaking group includes the founder of gestalt psychology, Wolfgang Köhler, engineer/biologist Paul Weiss, and Bertalanffy. From England, she identifies two subgroups: the early organicist biologists Haldane and Russell and psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan; and a later group including Joseph Woodger, Joseph Needham, and Conrad Waddington, who were all concerned with problems in embryology and formed part of the Theoretical Biology Group in England, along with Dorothy Wrinch and J. D. Bernal. The third major lineage grew out of the work of the late-nineteenth-century French physiologist Claude Bernard and includes American biologists Walter Cannon and Lawrence Henderson, along with the English neurologist Charles Sherrington. The influence of this last group was most significant in connection with the work of Gerard and James Grier Miller.⁸

Organismic biology was also shaped by a number of parallel developments in other fields. From philosophy, the holistic approaches of Alfred North Whitehead and Jan Christiaan Smuts were particularly important. Miller studied with Whitehead at Harvard, and traces his interest in the integration of biological and social theory to Whitehead’s encouragement. Mathematical developments also had a profound impact on the evolution of organismic models, most significantly in the work of Alfred Lotka and Vito Volterra on population dynamics and in D’Arcy Thompson’s classical work On Growth and Form, which elaborated the mathematical foundations of the science of form. Kenneth Boulding considered Thompson’s work central to the evolution of his own thinking, along with that of Lotka, whom he referred to as the “John the Baptist of General Systems.” Lotka is also credited with the introduction of the open-system concept, which was further developed in Bertalanffy’s work.⁹

Gerard’s organismic conception of society was profoundly shaped by Herbert Spencer’s early work in sociology, reflecting the ongoing relationship between biological models and social thought. Another important development in connection with the rise of both organismic and molecular biology had to do with the role of information in overcoming the entropic tendencies of matter and allowing for the evolution of complex living systems, which ultimately provided a critical breakthrough in research on the mechanisms of genetic transmission. A consideration of the issues central to debates between vitalists and mechanists in the early 1900s will provide some context for this broad range of developments in biology during the first half of the twentieth century.

VITALISM AND MECHANISM

Central to the debate between vitalism and mechanism is the nature and source of organization in living systems. In general, vitalists argue that physical and chemical laws are not adequate to explain the complex organization and seemingly purposive phenomenon of life, and that some kind of organizing intelligence is necessary to explain the ever-increasing complexity of living forms. Aristotle’s notion of final cause (i.e., the purpose for which something is created) is fundamentally a vitalist notion, implying intelligence or purposiveness in the evolution of life. This is reflected in the Aristotelian concept of entelechy, defined as the form-giving agency or force that regulates and directs the development and functioning of organisms. The term “entelechy” was adopted by the German biologist Hans Driesch, the foremost spokesman for the vitalist position at the turn of the century, whose work provided inspiration for Bertalanffy’s conception of organismic biology. Driesch describes entelechy as an immaterial organizing principle that is responsible for the organization and regulation of inorganic matter in the phenomenon of life.¹⁰

Another important dimension of the debate echoes the perennial dilemma between free will and determinism, mechanists tending toward a more deterministic orientation and vitalists arguing for the increasing autonomy of organisms at progressively higher levels of organization. Although mechanists might be able to explain the details of life in materialistic terms, Driesch argued that mechanism was incapable of explaining their relationship to the functioning of the whole organism. For him, the autonomy and wholeness of the organism were fundamental and closely interrelated. In contrast with the mechanistic view, which might be seen as focusing on externally imposed laws of nature, Driesch’s concept of entelechy posited an intrinsic and autonomous organizing principle. In rejecting mechanistic analogies between the apparent purposiveness of machines and the similarly illusionary purposiveness of human existence, Driesch argued that the former are determined by a static structure, and that the teleology (or purposiveness) of living organisms is dynamic, enabling them to respond to changes in their environment.¹¹

Driesch’s position grew out of his work on developing sea urchin embryos. According to the prevailing mechanistic theory of development, if he cut the embryo in half in its early stages, each half should develop into half of a sea urchin. What emerged instead were two whole though somewhat smaller sea urchins. From this experiment, he derived the concepts of equipotentiality and equifinality that were central to the development of Bertalanffy’s conception of organismic biology. Equipotentiality referred to the ability of evolving cells to differentiate themselves in response to the pattern of the whole organism. In other words, cells were differentiated in accordance with their position in the developing organism, not according to some predetermined program within each individual cell. Equifinality referred to the ability of the embryo to reach its final state from many different starting points and through different developmental pathways. Rather than being rigidly determined, developmental processes in the embryo were able to adapt to changing conditions, maintaining the integrity of the developing organism.¹²

Jacques Loeb, a contemporary of Driesch, provides a noteworthy example of the mechanistic perspective as it was articulated in early-twentieth-century biology. Reflecting the materialistic reductionism common among biologists during that period, he argued that consciousness and life were merely “epiphenomena” of physical and chemical interactions. In what Philip Pauly describes as his “engineering approach” to biology, Loeb sought to control the behavior of living organisms. He was a pioneer in the objective analysis of behavior, and a precursor and major mentor of the behaviorist psychologist John Watson. He emphasized quantitative analysis, sought to ground ...