posted by SantaLuca
On Barabasi's Linked: a Systems View, but not Living System
The work of Barabasi and others (explored in Barabasi's book 'Linked',) describes how networks come to have a power law distribution. In this kind of distribution, frequently called the 80-20 rule, most of the business, most of the connections, most of the money, not to mention most of the power and the glory, go disproportionately to the few. >P>Barabasi is a physicist, and consequently he sees the world -and the networks he analyzes in this book- through the eyes of a physicist. However, seeing the world in this way has one serious drawback for the study of living systems. Unfortunately, that drawback is not peculiar to Barabasi but typifies the outlook and approach of modern science in general. It is an outlook and approach which is almost exclusively reductionist.
Classical reductionism assumes that giving a description of the parts of a system amounts to giving a description of the whole system. By focusing only on the parts and the structure of networks, Barabasi focuses only on the mechanistic aspects of networks and their organization, but he does not look at the macro behavior of the system. The fact that a particular network is scale-free does not say anything about how a particular system actually behaves. And yet, when thinking of a living system, we really want to know how it acts, how it responds, how it deals with people, and how it interfaces with other organizations. To say that a system is scale-fee really doesn’t address any of these important questions about a living system. The reductionist approach is designed to find what things are made of and how the pieces are put together, but it is poorly designed to explain the holistic behavior of systems. Reductionism is the wrong tool for understanding the behavior of living systems.
A living system is more than the sum of its parts - or, in network terms, more that the sum of the links and nodes in the system. It takes more than being able to specify a structure and its parts to specify what a living system is. But if that’s the case, then how do we regain a holistic approach? In thinking about this, we would do well to take inspiration from studies in macro biology. This following passage succinctly differentiates a living from a mechanical system: ‘In contrast [to a mechanical system], in an organism, the “parts” exist both for one another and by means of one another.’ (pg.4, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution; Stuart A. Kauffman, Oxford Univ. Press, 1993; 0-19-507951-5.)
Living systems also exist along a unique, one-way timeline; this is one thing that distinguishes living from non-living systems. In a non-living system like a computer, we could take all the pieces apart, spread them out on the floor, and then reassemble them. We still have the same computer. Similarly, but on a much larger scale, we could imagine taking the internet apart, severing all the links to all the nodes, and then relinking all the nodes. Other than the downtime, the internet would be the same. But clearly, biological living systems can’t be treated the same way; once apart, they can’t be reassembled into what they once were- a living system. The unique timeline has been broken.
Human social living systems have a distinctive feature absent from other biological living systems. Social systems are created, they are artificial, and they have a purpose, a reason for having been created. This teleology, or purpose, can never be found through a reductionist approach to the structure of human social systems. Human systems are purposely created around goals. In business, this goal-oriented behavior would be summarized in a business plan. In living systems, the point is to focus analysis on the whole system and the behavior of the whole system. Likewise, in human social systems, analysis needs to focus on how the system reaches its goals - rather than just looking at parts and structure.
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