Hi Slap,
From the back cover of General Systems theory (1968):
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.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
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).
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 .
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