"The specialist concentrates on detail and disregards the wider structure which gives it context. The new scientist, however, concentrates on structure on all levels of magnitude and complexity, and fits into its general framework. He discerns relationships and situations, not atomistic facts and events. By this method he can understand a lot more about a great many more things than the rigorous specialist, although his understanding is somewhat more general and approximate. Yet some knowledge of connected complexity is preferable even to a more detailed knowledge of atomized simplicity, if it is connected complexity with which we are surrounded in nature and of which we ourselves are a part. If this is the case, to have an adequate grasp of reality we must look at things as systems with properties and structures of their own. Systems of various kinds can then be compared, their relationships within still larger systems defined, and a general context established. If we are to understand what we are, and what we are faced with in the social and natural world, evolving a general theory of systems is imperative."

Slots and Values
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