Organisms, Machines, and Thunderstorms: A History of Self-Organization, Part Two. Complexity, Emergence, and Stable Attractors
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hsns.2009.39.1.pdf
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279.96 KB
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332b39ac7fa5dbff3a1d085d8d7fd2af
Author(s)
Keller, Evelyn F
Date Issued
January 2009
Journal
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences
Publisher
University of California Press
Citation
Keller, Evelyn Fox. “Organisms, Machines, and Thunderstorms: A History of Self-Organization, Part Two. Complexity, Emergence, and Stable Attractors.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 39.1 (2009): 1-31.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Part Two of this essay focuses on what might be called the third and most recent chapter in the history of self-organization, in which the term has been claimed to denote a paradigm shift or revolution in scientific thinking about complex systems. The developments responsible for this claim began in the late 1960s and came directly out of the physical sciences. They rapidly attracted wide interest and led to yet another redrawing of the boundaries between organisms, machines, and naturally occurring physical systems (such as thunderstorms). In this version of self-organization, organisms are once again set apart from machines precisely because the latter depend on an outside designer, but—in contrast to Kant's ontology—they are now assimilated to patterns in the inorganic world on the grounds that they, too, like many biological phenomena, arise spontaneously.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2009.39.1.1
