Order,Chaos and Sanity 2.

Before we start, I should point out that everything I say ought to be preceded with the letters AFWK - shorthand for "As Far As We
Know" - since there are very few certainties and our knowledge of the world is constantly being revised. Competing beliefs in certain truths have caused more people to suffer and die than all other causes combined: in fact,as we shall see when I deal with perception, it affects everyone's life every day, yet few of us ever question our own beliefs though we are incessantly question- ing everyone else's! so - AFWK.
One of the few certainties is that change is the only constant. We all know from our own experience that the world - of which we are parts - swings between order and chaos, and either end of this range taken to extremes will mean that whatever we are faced with will be completely beyond our control. Everything that exists between the extremes can do so successfully only if there is some way that it can detect the changes in its environment and a mechanism that enables it to adapt to the changes. In other words it has to be a system of a type that will ensure its survival and the better we understand systems the better our chances. So what is a system? It is a collection of components that relate to each other in a very specific way to accomplish certain functions. And that, of course, sounds both simple and obvious, but as soon as we start examining the way we humans deal with our environments it becomes startlingly obvious that we act as though such an idea had never occurred to us. As we shall see,we pay lots of attention to the components of, say, a cell but we often pay no attention at all to the relations between the parts, with are as essential for the workings of the cell as are the parys.
If this should sound ridiculous - well, it is. But the entire history of scientific investigations is riddled with examples of just how capable we are of doing so. Take the 'paradigm', or world view of how the world works, which has changed over the last dozen or so thousand years. The view that has dominated increasingly since the renaissance, and what is referred to as the scientific revolution, is that the world operates like a huge machine in which all the components operate together as interacting cogs. Scientists focussed their efforts on producing techniques that enabled us to discover how specific parts of the machine work, and one of their most effective processes involved analysing first the nature of the components of the external world and then how they worked together. This then enabled us to control, or at least adapt more effectively, whatever was being investigatged. Analysis therefore was one of the bedrocks of scientific research, and the success we have had in learning how to control our external world has been truly amazing.
But though infinitely more sophisticated in dealing with the external world, we continue to demonstrate that our understanding of the nature of human beings, either as individuals or in groups,
is responsible for the possibility of self-extinction changing to being a probability. I shall deal at more length with this later
but I am concerned to show that the very methods that have been so successful in our gaining so much control over much of our natural
world is due largely to the failure to recognise the relentless laws imposed by the nature of systems. I introduced the role of analysis as having been so important in dealing with the external world. One of the most vital features of what is referred to as General Systems Theory is that if we confine ourselves to analysis of events and thereby learn in great detail about the
components involved, and then fail to re-integrate that informat -ion we may cause the eventual destruction of any system we are studing. Finding that a lack of glucose is creating symptoms, then taking in a lot of glucose to deal with the symptoms could produce serious results if other factors are not considered and dealt with. It is essential therefore to understand the basic features of systems theory, for if we don't, we will go on making the same mistake repeatedly.

BASIC SYSTEMS THEORY.
1. Everything that is not chaotic is a system.
2. A biological system is dynamic (changing), not static.
3. Each system consists of components and their relations.
4. Each system has two aspects:
- it consists of sub-systems which are themselves components
- it is itself a subsystem/component of a larger system.
5. Between the components of a system specific relations must exist
(see 'autopoesis' later for details) thus relations are as
important as the components and are ignored at great peril.
6. The role each subsystem plays in the larger system is its
particular niche in each of the levels of the whole - this is
the case with all organisms - they fulful a role in the larger
ecology to which it belongs and without which the ecology wont
function as it should. Wolves without prey die out.