The Web of Life

Fritoj Capra, (1996)
Originally published on my blog

In his book, The web of life, Fritoj Capra provides a synthesis of ideas to present a new understanding of life both in the biological and philosophical sense. He advocates for a connective view of life that integrates ideas from various realms including biology, ecology, physics, systems thinking, and cybernetics.

Part 1: The Cultural Context

Deep Ecology

Capra starts off by outlining Deep Ecology, a new perspective through which to view living systems. Deep Ecology questions our anthropocentric notions of how life is structured and advocates for a paradigm shift to a more ecological, holistic worldview. Capra makes a distinction between ‘ecological’ and ‘holistic’ noting that ‘holistic’ seems less appropriate for this new paradigm:

“A holistic view of, say, a bicycle means to see the bicycle as a functional whole and to understand the interdependence of its parts accordingly. An ecological view of the bicycle includes that but it adds to it the perceptions of how the bicycle is embedded in it natural and social environment –  where the raw materials that went into it came from, how it was manufactured, how it use affects the natural environment and the community by which it is used and so on.” (7)

This emphasis on the importance of context and contextual knowledge is central to Capra’s ideas and continues throughout the book.

In this first chapter Capra mentions social ecology and ecofeminism as important intellectual movements that embrace similar ideas. He also mentions the importance of shift in values to support the shifting paradigms, “both may be seen as shifts from self-assertion to integration.” (9) Neither one is seen as better or right but a dynamic balance must be struck between the two. In Capra’s view, Western industrial culture has placed an imbalanced emphasis on self-assertion and the related values. He provides this chart to depict the ideologies and values needed to re-balance society.

Deep ecology is rooted in earth-centered values that would promote a new system of ethics. This new ethics would not rely on logic and would accept the notion that all systems are one inter-connected reality.

Part 2: The Rise of Systems Thinking

In Part 2, Capra introduces and summarizes various disciplines that have dominated (scientific) thought throughout history, paying particular attention to their foundational understanding of life’s structure,

“during this century the change from the mechanistic to the ecological paradigm has proceeded in different form and at different speeds in various scientific fields…the basic tension is one between the parts and the whole. The emphasis on the parts has been called mechanistic, reductionist, or atomistic; the emphasis on the whole holistic, organismic, or ecological…the holistic perspective has become known as ‘systemic’” (17)

From parts to the whole

Throughout chapter 2, From parts to the whole, (very similar to the title of Heisenberg’s scientific autobiography, The Part and the Whole) Capra traces the legacy of mechanistic scientific thought through history, starting with the ancient dichotomy between substance (matter/structure) and form (pattern/order). Aristotle and others laid the groundwork for 16th and 17th century thinkers such as Copernicus, Galileo (planets, orbits), Descartes (mind/matter), and Newton (atomistic physics) to further entrench and propagate a mechanistic view of life. Eighteenth century thinkers and Romantic philosophers, Kant specifically, offered a differing perspective by affirming that science could only go so far in offering mechanistic views of life and in certain areas “such explanations were inadequate, scientific knowledge needed to be supplemented by considering nature as being purposeful.” (21) Kant held that organisms (but not machines) were self-reproducing, self-organizing, wholes. This concept of self-organization comes up later and becomes an important key concept in cybernetics, systems thinking, and Capra’s “web of life”.

Though 18th century thinkers offered a welcome change in perspective, 19th century advances in biology (microscope, cell theory, embryology, microbiology, heredity, biochemistry and microorganisms) and evolutionary thought (Darwin) revived mechanistic views. Despite this reductionistic revival, many scientists still opposed mechanism and established their own lines of holistic thinking by favoring vitalism or organicism. Both ideologies uphold that laws of physics and biology apply to organisms however, these laws do not go far enough to explain the phenomenon of life; studying life as an integrated, organismic whole cannot be fully understood by studying its parts. The two ideologies differ on their views of the whole: Vitalists hold that a nonphysical aspect, a force or a field, must be added to the hard sciences to explain life; an organismic view postulates that to understand life, one must understand its “organizing relations.” (25)  By merely adding another entity vitalists did not move beyond the Cartesian analogy, they remained limited by the same issues and metaphors. On the contrary, by advocating for a systemic understanding of relations, organismic views escaped Cartesian dualism and eventually became dominant, leading to the development of organismic biology and later, systems thinking.

Some of the earliest systems thinkers were organismic biologists. In their perspective and research, the importance of systems and ‘organized complexities’ replaced a focus on function, parts, and old notions of hierarchy. These early systems thinkers recognized the differing levels of complexity that ran throughout living systems and understood that “at each level of complexity the observed phenomena exhibits properties that do not exist at the lower level”. They named these properties “emergent properties” and these observations lead to the formal discipline of systems thinking which holds that “the essential properties of an organism, or living system, are properties of the whole, which none of the parts have. They arise from the interactions and relationships among the parts.” (29)

Postulating that properties of parts were not intrinsic but rather only understood within the context of the whole, systems thinking shook the foundations of Western science which had been built on the notion that complex systems could be analyzed and understood by looking at the parts. By shifting this perspective from part to whole, more attention was given to the importance of organizing principles and understanding became contingent upon context. In this view, understanding does not come by way of analysis, by taking things apart, but rather by looking at and trying to understand the whole.

“If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry, — a narrow belt.”

R. W. Emerson, Experience, Essays: Second Series (1844)

The new views purported by systems thinkers spread through all of science, including physics. During the early 20th century physicists experienced vast changes and challenges to their most fundamental ideas. Challenges to mechanistic and reductionistic models opposed the prevailing Newtonian view of reality. In the 1920s, physicists found that, at a certain subatomic level, reality dissolves and does not act in a Newtonian, mechanistic way. At this subatomic level, particles disappear and are replaced with patterns of waves and probabilities, “nature does not show us any isolated building blocks, but rather appears as a complex web of relationships among the various parts of a unified whole.” (30) Quantum physicists had found that all of life is merely interconnections and relationships, both of which are subjective and shaped by our observation and measurement of this reality.

Just as systems thinking influenced the hard sciences, developments in psychology during the early 20th century reflect the infusion of systemic ideas. At the time German psychologists deeply discussed the Gestaltproblem to gain better understanding of  “organic form”.  Gestalt referred to “an irreducible perceptual pattern” (31) wherein the whole was more than the sum of its parts. Gestalt psychologists were concern with patterns and associations and held that organisms “perceive things not in terms of isolated elements, but as integrated perceptual patterns – meaningful organized wholes, which exhibit qualities that are absent in their parts.” (32) With these developments, not only is our physical world based on an organized set of relationships but we perceive it this way too.

This holistic, systemic view of life also lead to developments in the study of our natural environment, giving birth to the discipline of ecology, a systems view of nature and living organisms. Throughout the end of the 19th and into the beginning of the 20th century ecology was founded, words like “environment”, “ecosystem”, and “biosphere” were used for the first time, and concepts such as “plant communities”, “food chains”, and “food cycles” were studied and developed.

Systems theories

The rise of holistic perspectives in (organismic) biology, psychology, and ecology lead to the formation of a new area of thought known as systems thinking which emphasized interconnectedness, relations, and context. Several criteria are commonly associated with systems thinking.

1. Systems thinking shifts focus from parts to the whole.

The essential properties are of the whole and are not found within the parts.

2. Attention must oscillate back and forth between systems levels.

Different levels within a system represent different levels of complexity. Within the living world, systems are nested within and surrounded by other systems. Certain “emergent properties” only appear, or emerge, at a certain level of complexity.

3. Systems thinking is contextual and inherently environmental.

Analysis, or breaking apart, will not provide insight into systematically organized wholes. Emergent properties will disappear if the system is broken apart. The system must be understood as a whole embedded within its context and environment.

4. There are no parts. Parts are actually patterns in an inseparable web of relations.

Quantum physics revealed that at the most fundamental levels of life, parts do not exists but rather the world consists of wavelike patterns of probabilities. Relationships are primary and “objects themselves are networks of relationships, embedded in larger networks…boundaries of the discernable patterns (‘objects’) are secondary”. (37)

5. Systems thinking can be expressed in terms of networks.

Vision of knowledge as a building with foundations must be replaced by the view of knowledge as a network of relationships with no foundation. Perception of reality as interconnected networks helps further the perspective of reality as a dynamic web of interrelated events. Physics is no longer the fundamental science since there are no fundamentals but rather each set of differing rules outlines properties of the network depending on the level of complexity.

6. Systems thinking involves a shift from objective to “epistemic” science where the method of knowing and questioning (including measurement) becomes an integral aspect of the scientific theory.

Can anything be known if there is no fundamental knowledge and reality exists as relationships and interconnected networks?  Within a systemic approach there is approximate knowledge, we can know about various aspects of a phenomenon but never truly reach a complete description. This dismantles the Cartesian idea of scientific certainty and makes room for a certain level of uncertainty by recognizing “that all scientific concepts and theories are limited and approximate.” (41)

Just as systems thinking is always contextual, environmental thinking, it is also always process thinking, “every structure is seen as the manifestation of underlying processes”. (42) Ludwig von Bertalanffy first highlighted the process aspect in the 1930’s and this was taken forward by cyberneticists later in the 20th century. Individuals such as Heraclitus (“Everything flows”), A. N. Whitehead (Process-oriented philosophy), and W. Cannon (Homeostasis) had integrated the notion of process into their thinking and ideas which influenced Bertalanffy and later cyberneticists.

Bertalanffy, credited as the creator of the first theoretical framework, described the principles of organization of living systems in his “general systems theory.” However, these ideas very closely mirrored an earlier theory called Tektology developed by Alexander Bogdanov to describe a “science of structures”. With Tektology Bogdanov hoped to clarify and explain the modes of organization for all living and nonliving things. Bogdanov aimed to create a science of organization to illuminate “the totality of connections among systematic elements” (44). According to Bognadov, this could be done by focusing on two organizational aspects, formation and regulation; formation focused on linkages and regulation focused on how systems self-regulate to maintain some level of balance.

Because his ideas were ahead of their time and sheltered away in Russia, Bognadov’s theory never spread and Bertalanffy’s “open systems” concept and “general systems theory” are credited for establishing systems thinking as a major scientific discipline.

Logic of the Mind

Cybernetics

Feedback

Information Theory

Cybernetics of the Brain

Impact on Society

Part 3: The Pieces of the Puzzle 

Models of Self Organization