I would like to comment upon Conrad's statement:
"When we look at a biological system we are looking at the face of the
> underlying physics of the universe... The picture is not one of
> simple upscale percolation. The higher levels act down scale on the
> lower levels to redefine their fundamental characteristics... the flow
of influence is thus circular as well as vertical, with multiple inner
> loops. The circularity is imperfect; complete self-consistency is never
> attainable..."
> This appears in Conrad (1996, BioSystems vol. 38 p. 108).
>
This message has been advanced in more detail in my own studies,
published in:
1986. Evolving Hierarchical Systems. Columbia University Press (Conrad;'s
work up to then informed this book)
1993. Development and Evolution. MIT Press (Chapter 3)
2002. Summary of the principles of hierarchy theory. General Systems
Bulletin 31: 13-17. (I am updating this paper, and am willing to send a copy
to anyone who requests it.)
The 'devil is in the details' as they say. From that point of view,
Conrad's "the flow of influence is thus circular as well as vertical, with
multiple inner loops." requires a lot of work, which I have laid some
groundwork for in the above listed texts.
STAN
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
> Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
> Avda. Gómez Laguna, 25, Pl. 11ª
> 50009 Zaragoza, Spain
> Telf: 34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) Fax: 34 976 71 5554
> pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
> http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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