Hi Slap,

Quote Originally Posted by slapout9 View Post
Hi Marct, I am not surprised you noticed that... being a Anthro Man and all The first book I think that became known to the General Population in th 60's was the one by Ludwig Von Bertalanffy's (General Systems Theory) who was a biologist if I remember correctly who was trying to make that exact point.
From the back cover of General Systems theory (1968):
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, recognized throughout the world as a pioneer in promoting the organismic view in biology and the role of symbol-making in the interpretation of human experience, is also acknowledged as a founder of General Systems Theory
Exactly. He was also drawing on earlier work (1957) by Alfred J. Lotka - Elements of Mathematical Biology - a great text that I find myself going back to fairly often.

Quote Originally Posted by slapout9 View Post
Open systems are living systems and closed systems are usually mechanical. Living systems adapt and quickly if they are going to survive, closed ones don't until a living system acts to change it.
They other thing that most people forget is that "open" and "closed" and labels of convenience that really refer to the boundary conditions of the system. All boundary conditions are "fuzzy" in reality and this tends to be forgotten (one of the key observations from Chaos Theory).

Quote Originally Posted by slapout9 View Post
Somehow over time people have forgotten that systems theory started with living/biological systems....except our enemy hasn't forgotten and they seem to understand it very well.
Sure they do - they are culturally predisposed to think of reality as a biological system rather than a mechanistic system . Personally, I blame Descartes for our mechanistic views; then again, I never really liked that guy .