| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
| Contents | ||
The most robust and unambiguous examples of self-organizing systems are from physics, where the concept was first noted. Self-organization is also relevant in chemistry, where it has often been taken as being synonymous with self-assembly. The concept of self-organization is central to the description of biological systems, from the subcellular to the ecosystem level. There are also cited examples of "self-organizing" behaviour found in the literature of many other disciplines, both in the natural sciences and the social sciences such as economics or anthropology. Self-organization has also been observed in mathematical systems such as cellular automata.
Sometimes the notion of self-organization is conflated with that of the related concept of emergence. Properly defined, however, there may be instances of self-organization without emergence and emergence without self-organization, and it is not clear from the literature that the phenomena are the same. The link between emergence and self-organization remains an active research question.
The idea that the dynamics of a system can tend by themselves to increase the inherent order of a system has a long history. One of the earliest statements of this idea was by the philosopher Descartes, in the fifth part of his Discourse on Method, where he presents it hypothetically. Descartes further elaborated on the idea at great length in a book called Le Monde that was never published.
The ancient atomists (among others) believed that a designing intelligence was unnecessary, arguing that given enough time and space and matter, organization was ultimately inevitable, although there would be no preferred tendency for this to happen. What Descartes introduced was the idea that the ordinary laws of nature tend to produce organization (For related history, see Avram Vartanian, From Descartes to Diderot).
Beginning with the 18th century naturalistNatural history is an umbrella term for what are now usually viewed as a number of distinct scientific disciplines. Most definitions include the study of living things (e. biology, including botany and zoology); other definitions extend the topic to inclus a movement arose that sought to understand the "universal laws or form" in order to explain the observed forms of living organisms. Because of its association with LamarckismLamarckism is a now discredited theory of biological evolution developed by French biologist Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck in the 19th century. Lamarckism holds that traits acquired (or diminished) during the lifetime of an o, their ideas fell into disrepute until the early 20th century, when pioneers such as D'Arcy Wentworth ThompsonD'Arcy Wentworth Thompson ( May 2, 1860- June 21, 1948) was a biologist and mathematician and the author of the 1917 book, On Growth and Form an influential work of striking originality. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, he has been called "the first biomathem revived them. The modern understanding is that there are indeed universal laws (arising from fundamental physics and chemistry) that govern growth and form in biological systems.
The term "self-organizing" seems to have been first introduced in 1947Events January January 1 British mines nationalized January 1 Nigeria gains limited autonomy January 1 The Canadian Citizenship Act went into effect January 3 Proceedings of the United States Congress are televised for the first time. January 10 United Na by the psychiatrist and engineer W. Ross Ashby. Self-organization as a word and concept was used by those associated with general systems theorySystems theory or general systems theory or systemics is an interdisciplinary field which studies systems as a whole. Systems theory was founded by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, William Ross Ashby and others between the 1940s and the 1970s on principles from ph in the 1960sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s Years: 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 Events and trends The 1960s was a turbulent decade of change around, but did not become commonplace in the scientific literature until its adoption by physicists and researchers in the field of complex systems in the 1970s and 1980s.
(As an indication of the increasing importance of this concept, when queried with the keyword self-organ*, Dissertation Abstracts finds nothing before 1954, and only four entries before 1970. There were 17 in the years 1971--1980; 126 in 1981--1990; and 593 in 1991--2000.)