The Web of Life : A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems

From Lazer

The book first defines the current scientific paradigm called Deep Ecology. Deep Ecology is the idea that humans are not the center of the world. Even that humans are not discernible organisms from the entire Earth's ecosystem. This goes along the same lines that human organs are not clearly discernible parts of the human body. Meaning one can not just point at one organ and say it does this function, because most organs can not perform their main function with out the help of the rest of the body. This idea is that everything works in a network and that the sum of the parts has new emergent behavior that the part do not have on their own.

The book then goes into the history of the life paradigms.

Name	Time	Idea
Christian Theology	16th century and before	The idea that god designed life and humans are the center of that life
Cartesian Mechanism	16th and 17th centuries to late 18th centuries	The idea that everything works like a machine. All of life could be measure and calculated to exact values.
Romantic	Late 18th century	A qualitative understanding of the basic properties of life in terms of visualized forms.
Mechanism	Early 19th century	With the advances in Biology the cells were though of as the building blocks of life.
Vitalism	Late 19th century	The first steps toward Deep Ecology. Believed that Physics and chemistry are the basis of organisms , but do not fully explain their behaviors. Also believed that some force (god) must be added to the laws of physics and chemistry to understand life.
Organismic Biology	Early 20th century	Replace the god force in Vitalism with organizing relations.
Systemic	Late 20th century	The essential properties of an organism is properties of the whole, which none of the parts have.

The next chapter goes over many different Systems Theories, which all have the same idea of Deep Ecology.

Then the book goes into feedback systems. A feedback system is one that is controlled based on actual effects that it has made to its environment. They further define Cybernetics as the study of open energy systems and closed control systems. Meaning that organisms are get their energy from an outside source and that they contain their control system internally (autonomous systems). Talk about technology crafts the way people believe organisms work. For example in the 17th century clocks were the only things that moved autonomously, therefore people in those times believed that the body worked in the same way as a clock. Like today computer are the new technology that moves autonomously and also processes information, therefore people today believe that computers are the way that the brain and mind work. This idea of humans are information processors was changed to humans are idea processors and information comes from idea. Therefore this is the idea that the brain works in a more abstract view than just concrete information. This is related to the idea of what Copycat works off of.

The author argues that the key to the theory of living systems is the synthesis of substance and patterns. When I think of patterns I think of programming patterns. I do believe that those are the best way to describe how a system works. One can not describe a computer system just off of the classes or object in it. One needs the patterns of how the system interacts.

Then the book goes into many examples of non-living matter displaying self-organizing behavior with the key ingredent of being far from thermal equilibrium. The examples are Benard instability, Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction, catalytic network of enzymes. The catalytic network of enzymes I found interesting because it is a good theory of how life began. It follows the same idea that Dawkins presented in Selfish Gene. The theory is that these hypercycles are stable, self-replicating, and evolving systems.

Definitions

• Reductionist - the idea that all living organisms behavior can be explained by studying the components that make them. Therefore chemistry and physics can explain all living organisms behavior.

• Self-organization - is the spontaneous emergence of new structures and new forms of behavior in open systems far from equilibrium, characterized by internal feedback loops and described mathematically by nonlinear equations.