Development and Evolution: Complexity and Change in Biology

Portada
MIT Press, 1993 - 357 páginas
Development and Evolution surveys and illuminates the key themes of rapidly changing fields and areas of controversy that the redefining the theory and philosophy of biology. It continues Stanley Salthe's investigation of evolutionary theory, begun in his influential book Evolving Hierarchical Systems, while negating the implicit philosophical mechanisms of much of that work. Here Salthe attempts to reinitiate a theory of biology from the perspective of development rather than from that of evolution, recognizing the applicability of general systems thinking to biological and social phenomena and pointing towards a non-Darwinian and even a postmodern biology.

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Contenido

Aristotelian Complex Causality
10
The Problem of Change
25
The Specification Hierarchy
52
Summary
93
Macroscopic Information as Entropic
117
Toward an Infodynamics
131
Ecological and Genealogical Hierarchies
144
Agency
159
Emergence as a Mode of Development
214
Change in Hegelian Systems
227
Notes toward Modeling Change
241
Developmental Cosmology
258
The Infodynamical View of the Origin and Evolution
277
Appendix
291
Glossary
309
References
327

SelfOrganization and the CollectingCascading Cycle
173
Summary
192

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