"To understand how complex dynamical systems, living or non-living, linguistic or non-linguistic, come to be organized as systems, to understand how their inherent dynamic nature gives rise to organizations and forms that have found a balance between potentiality for change and evolution on the one hand, and requisite stability in a given environment on the other, is the main ambition of Evolotionary ..." WorldCat

"This book summarizes most of the prior works on the scalar hierarchy system -- e.g., [ population [ organism [cell [ macromolecule]]]], with the interpretation [[smaller scale] larger scale]. The discussion focuses on issues in evolutionary biology and ecology, but goes beyond these into systems science in order to discuss the principles of this kind of hierarchy. There is a brief comparison with the specification hierarchy (here called a "hierarchy of generalization") in connection with Figure 16, worth mentioning because several persons have found that it reveals the difference between these two major hierarchical systems particularly well. Three major conclusions of this text were: (a) One needs to model minimally three scalar levels in order to capture the complexity involved here (extensional complexity) -- the "Basic Triadic System". (b) Dynamics at the different levels are screened off from each other because they proceed at order of magnitude different rates, and so informational relations between levels are nontransitive. (c) In this system new levels always emerge between two already existing levels."

Slots and Values
title	Evolving Hierarchical Systems: their structure and representation
dPub	1985
author	Unnamed
quotation	Unnamed