https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johari_window
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns
Sunday, June 25, 2023
Lynn Margulis (March 5, 1938 – November 22, 2011)
Today I Learned
Lynn Margulis (March 5, 1938 – November 22, 2011)
cell organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts were once independent bacteria (a largely ignored theory for decade)
substantiated through genetic evidence, cell organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts were once independent bacteria,
In particular, Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei
Lynn Margulis, en.wikipedia.org citation: "She later formulated a theory that proposed symbiotic relationships between organisms of different phyla, or kingdoms, as the driving force of evolution, and explained genetic variation as occurring mainly through transfer of nuclear information between bacterial cells or viruses and eukaryotic cells.[9] Her organelle genesis ideas are now widely accepted, but the proposal that symbiotic relationships explain most genetic variation is still something of a fringe idea.[9]"
"Lynn Margulis's name is as synonymous with symbiosis as Charles Darwin's is with evolution."
hmm .... I have always associated evolution with evolution
and symbiosis with symbiosis
evolution (Charles Darwin)
symbiosis (Lynn Margulis)
and I didn't know she was onced married to Carl Sagan
After reading about Lynn Margulis on her en.wikipedia.org entry, I am reminded of Barbara McClintock, another woman scientist; see book, A feeling for the organism, by Evelyn Fox Keller
Evelyn Fox Keller, A feeling for the organism : the life and work of Barbara McClintock, 1983
Her middle name has the exact same spelling as the English word, Petra (Arabic: ٱلْبَتْرَاء, romanized: Al-Batrāʾ; Ancient Greek: Πέτρα, "Rock", Nabataean: 𐢛𐢚𐢓𐢈),
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra
Petra is a historic and archaeological city in southern Jordan, originally known to its inhabitants as Raqmu or Raqēmō,[3][4].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis
Lynn Margulis (born Lynn Petra Alexander;[2][3] March 5, 1938 – November 22, 2011)[4] was an American evolutionary biologist, and was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution. Historian Jan Sapp has said that "Lynn Margulis's name is as synonymous with symbiosis as Charles Darwin's is with evolution."[5] In particular, Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei – an event Ernst Mayr called "perhaps the most important and dramatic event in the history of life"[6] – by proposing it to have been the result of symbiotic mergers of bacteria. Margulis was also the co-developer of the Gaia hypothesis with the British chemist James Lovelock, proposing that the Earth functions as a single self-regulating system, and was the principal defender and promulgator of the five kingdom classification of Robert Whittaker.
Throughout her career, Margulis' work could arouse intense objection (one grant application elicited the response, "Your research is crap. Don't ever bother to apply again.")[5][7] and her formative paper, "On the Origin of Mitosing Cells", appeared in 1967 after being rejected by about fifteen journals.[8
Still a junior faculty member at Boston University at the time, her theory that cell organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts were once independent bacteria was largely ignored for another decade, becoming widely accepted only after it was powerfully substantiated through genetic evidence.
(Her first publication, published with Plaut in 1958 in the Journal of Protozoology, was on the genetics of Euglena, flagellates which have features of both animals and plants.)[22]
(her essay "Gaia is a Tough Bitch" dates from 1995 – and it stated her own distinction from Lovelock as she saw it, which was primarily that she did not like the metaphor of Earth as a single organism, because, she said, "No organism eats its own waste").[8] In her 1998 book Symbiotic Planet, Margulis explored the relationship between Gaia and her work on symbiosis.[37]
By the mid-2000s, most scientists began to agree that there are more than five kingdoms.[42][43]
According to Margulis, the main problem, archaea, falls under the kingdom Prokaryotae alongside bacteria (in contrast to the three-domain system, which treats archaea as a higher taxon than kingdom, or the six-kingdom system, which holds that it is a separate kingdom).[41]
viability of round body forms of some spirochetes,
"Detailed research that correlates life histories of symbiotic spirochetes to changes in the immune system of associated vertebrates is sorely needed",
"I'm interested in spirochetes only because of our ancestry. I'm not interested in the diseases", and stated that she had called them "symbionts" because both the spirochete which causes syphilis (Treponema) and the spirochete which causes Lyme disease (Borrelia) only retain about 20% of the genes they would need to live freely, outside of their human hosts.[12]
"the set of symptoms, or syndrome, presented by syphilitics overlaps completely with another syndrome: AIDS", and also noted that Kary Mullis[a] said that "he went looking for a reference substantiating that HIV causes AIDS and discovered, 'There is no such document' ".[12]
source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis
____________________________________
CONVERSATION : LIFE
Chapter 7 "GAIA IS A TOUGH BITCH"
Lynn Margulis [5.1.96]
Richard Dawkins: I greatly admire Lynn Margulis's sheer courage and stamina in sticking by the endosymbiosis theory, and carrying it through from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy. I'm referring to the theory that the eukaryotic cell is a symbiotic union of primitive prokaryotic cells. This is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, and I greatly admire her for it.
___________
LYNN MARGULIS is a biologist; Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; author of The Origin of Eukaryotic Cells (1970), Early Life (1981), and Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (2d ed., 1993). She is also the coauthor, with Karlene V. Schwartz, of Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth (2d ed., 1988) and with Dorion Sagan of Microcosmos (1986), Origins Of Sex (1986), and Mystery Dance (1991).
Lynn Margulis's Edge Bio Page
[Lynn Margulis:] At any fine museum of natural history — say, in New York, Cleveland, or Paris — the visitor will find a hall of ancient life, a display of evolution that begins with the trilobite fossils and passes by giant nautiloids, dinosaurs, cave bears, and other extinct animals fascinating to children. Evolutionists have been preoccupied with the history of animal life in the last five hundred million years. But we now know that life itself evolved much earlier than that. The fossil record begins nearly four thousand million years ago! Until the 1960s, scientists ignored fossil evidence for the evolution of life, because it was uninterpretable.
I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and microorganisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge, and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date. Eldredge and Gould and their many colleagues tend to codify an incredible ignorance of where the real action is in evolution, as they limit the domain of interest to animals — including, of course, people. All very interesting, but animals are very tardy on the evolutionary scene, and they give us little real insight into the major sources of evolution's creativity. It's as if you wrote a four-volume tome supposedly on world history but beginning in the year 1800 at Fort Dearborn and the founding of Chicago. You might be entirely correct about the nineteenth-century transformation of Fort Dearborn into a thriving lakeside metropolis, but it would hardly be world history.
By "codifying ignorance" I refer in part to the fact that they miss four out of the five kingdoms of life. Animals are only one of these kingdoms. They miss bacteria, protoctista, fungi, and plants. They take a small and interesting chapter in the book of evolution and extrapolate it into the entire encyclopedia of life. Skewed and limited in their perspective, they are not wrong so much as grossly uninformed.
Of what are they ignorant? Chemistry, primarily, because the language of evolutionary biology is the language of chemistry, and most of them ignore chemistry. I don't want to lump them all together, because, first of all, Gould and Eldredge have found out very clearly that gradual evolutionary changes through time, expected by Darwin to be documented in the fossil record, are not the way it happened. Fossil morphologies persist for long periods of time, and after stasis, discontinuities are observed. I don't think these observations are even debatable. John Maynard Smith, an engineer by training, knows much of his biology secondhand. He seldom deals with live organisms. He computes and he reads. I suspect that it's very hard for him to have insight into any group of organisms when he does not deal with them directly. Biologists, especially, need direct sensory communication with the live beings they study and about which they write.
Reconstructing evolutionary history through fossils — paleontology — is a valid approach, in my opinion, but paleontologists must work simultaneously with modern-counterpart organisms and with "neontologists" — that is, biologists. Gould, Eldredge, and Lewontin have made very valuable contributions. But the Dawkins-Williams-Maynard Smith tradition emerges from a history that I doubt they see in its Anglophone social context. Darwin claimed that populations of organisms change gradually through time as their members are weeded out, which is his basic idea of evolution through natural selection. Mendel, who developed the rules for genetic traits passing from one generation to another, made it very clear that while those traits reassort, they don't change over time. A white flower mated to a red flower has pink offspring, and if that pink flower is crossed with another pink flower the offspring that result are just as red or just as white or just as pink as the original parent or grandparent. Species of organisms, Mendel insisted, don't change through time. The mixture or blending that produced the pink is superficial. The genes are simply shuffled around to come out in different combinations, but those same combinations generate exactly the same types. Mendel's observations are incontrovertible.
So J.B.S. Haldane, without a doubt a brilliant person, and R.A. Fisher, a mathematician, generated an entire school of English-speaking evolutionists, as they developed the neo- Darwinist population-genetic analysis to reconcile two unreconcilable views: Darwin's evolutionary view with Mendel's pragmatic, anti-evolutionary concept. They invented a language of population genetics in the 1920s to 1950s called neo-Darwinism, to rationalize these two fields. They mathematized their work and began to believe in it, spreading the word widely in Great Britain, the United States, and beyond. France and other countries resisted neo-Darwinism, but some Japanese and other investigators joined in the "explanation" activity.
Both Dawkins and Lewontin, who consider themselves far apart from each other in many respects, belong to this tradition. Lewontin visited an economics class at the University of Massachusetts a few years ago to talk to the students. In a kind of neo-Darwinian jockeying, he said that evolutionary changes are due to the Fisher-Haldane mechanisms: mutation, emigration, immigration, and the like. At the end of the hour, he said that none of the consequences of the details of his analysis had been shown empirically. His elaborate cost-benefit mathematical treatment was devoid of chemistry and biology. I asked him why, if none of it could be shown experimentally or in the field, he was so wedded to presenting a cost-benefit explanation derived from phony human social-economic "theory." Why, when he himself was pointing to serious flaws related to the fundamental assumptions, did he want to teach this nonsense? His response was that there were two reasons: the first was "P.E." "P.E.?," I asked. "What is P.E.? Population explosion? Punctuated equilibrium? Physical education?" "No," he replied, "P.E. is `physics envy,'" which is a syndrome in which scientists in other disciplines yearn for the mathematically explicit models of physics. His second reason was even more insidious: if he didn't couch his studies in the neo- Darwinist thought style (archaic and totally inappropriate language, in my opinion), he wouldn't be able to obtain grant money that was set up to support this kind of work.
The neo-Darwinist population-genetics tradition is reminiscent of phrenology, I think, and is a kind of science that can expect exactly the same fate. It will look ridiculous in retrospect, because it is ridiculous. I've always felt that way, even as a more-than-adequate student of population genetics with a superb teacher — James F. Crow, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. At the very end of the semester, the last week was spent on discussing the actual observational and experimental studies related to the models, but none of the outcomes of the experiments matched the theory.
I've been critical of mathematical neo-Darwinism for years; it never made much sense to me. We were all told that random mutations — most of which are known to be deleterious — are the main cause of evolutionary change. I remember waking up one day with an epiphanous revelation: I am not a neo-Darwinist! It recalled an earlier experience, when I realized that I wasn't a humanistic Jew.
Although I greatly admire Darwin's contributions and agree with most of his theoretical analysis and I am a Darwinist, I am not a neo-Darwinist. One of Darwin's major insights is the recognition that all organisms are related by common ancestry. Today direct evidence for common ancestry — genetic, chemical, and otherwise — is overwhelming. Populations of organisms grow and reproduce at rates that are not sustainable in the real world, and therefore many more die or fail to reproduce than actually complete their life histories. The fact that all the organisms that are born or hatched or budded off do not and cannot possibly survive is natural selection. Observable inherited variation appears in all organisms that are hatched, born, budded off, or produced by division, and some variants do outgrow and outreproduce others. These are the tenets of Darwinian evolution and natural selection. All thinking scientists are in complete agreement with these basic ideas, since they're supported by vast amounts of evidence.
Neo-Darwinism is an attempt to reconcile Mendelian genetics, which says that organisms do not change with time, with Darwinism, which claims they do. It's a rationalization that fuses two somewhat flawed traditions in a mathematical way, and that is the beginning of the end. Neo Darwinist formality uses an arithmetic and an algebra that is inappropriate for biology. The language of life is not ordinary arithmetic and algebra; the language of life is chemistry. The practicing neo-Darwinists lack relevant knowledge in, for example, microbiology, cell biology, biochemistry, molecular biology, and cytoplasmic genetics. They avoid biochemical cytology and microbial ecology. This is comparable to attempting a critical analysis of Shakespeare's Elizabethan phraseology and idiomatic expression in Chinese, while ignoring the relevance of the English language!
The neo-Darwinists say that variation originates from random mutation, defining mutation as any genetic change. By randomness they mean that characters appear randomly in offspring with respect to selection: if an animal needs a tail, it doesn't develop this tail because it needs it; rather, the animal randomly develops all sorts of changes and those with tails survive to produce more offspring. H.J. Muller, in the 1920s, discovered that not only do X rays increase the fruit-fly mutation rate, but even if fruit flies are isolated completely from X rays, solar radiation, and other environmental perturbation, a spontaneous mutation rate can be measured. Inherited variants do appear spontaneously; they have nothing to do with whether or not they're good for the organism in which they appear. Mutation was then touted as the source of variation- -that upon which natural selection acted — and the neo-Darwinian theory was declared complete. The science remaining required filling in the gaps in a "theory" with very few holes.
From many experiments, it is known that if mutagens like X rays or certain chemicals are presented to fruit flies, sick and dead flies result. No new species of fly appears — that is the real rub. Everyone agrees that such mutagens produce inherited variation. Everyone agrees that natural selection acts on this variation. The question is, From where comes the useful variation upon which selection acts? This problem has not yet been solved. But I claim that most significant inherited variation comes from mergers — from what the Russians, especially Konstantin S. Mereschkovsky, called symbiogenesis and the American Ivan Emanuel Wallin called symbionticism. Wallin meant by the term the incorporation of microbial genetic systems into progenitors of animal or plant cells. The new genetic system — a merger between microbe and animal cell or microbe and plant cell — is really different from the ancestral cell that lacks the microbe. Analogous to improvements in computer technology, instead of starting from scratch to make all new modules again, the symbiosis idea is an interfacing of preexisting modules. Mergers result in the emergence of new and more complex beings. I doubt new species form just from random mutation.
Symbiosis is a physical association between organisms, the living together of organisms of different species in the same place at the same time. My work in symbiosis comes out of cytoplasmic genetic systems. We were all taught that the genes were in the nucleus and that the nucleus is the central control of the cell. Early in my study of genetics, I became aware that other genetic systems with different inheritance patterns exist. From the beginning, I was curious about these unruly genes that weren't in the nucleus. The most famous of them was a cytoplasmic gene called "killer," which, in the protist Paramecium aurelia, followed certain rules of inheritance. The killer gene, after twenty years of intense work and shifting paradigmatic ideas, turns out to be in a virus inside a symbiotic bacterium. Nearly all extranuclear genes are derived from bacteria or other sorts of microbes. In the search for what genes outside the nucleus really are, I became more and more aware that they're cohabiting entities, live beings. Live small cells reside inside the larger cells. Understanding that led me and others to study modern symbioses.
Symbiosis has nothing to do with cost or benefit. The benefit/cost people have perverted the science with invidious economic analogies. The contention is not over modern symbioses, simply the living together of unlike organisms, but over whether "symbiogenesis" — long-term symbioses that lead to new forms of life — has occurred and is still occurring. The importance of symbiogenesis as a major source of evolutionary change is what is debated. I contend that symbiogenesis is the result of long-term living together — staying together, especially involving microbes- -and that it's the major evolutionary innovator in all lineages of larger nonbacterial organisms.
In 1966, I wrote a paper on symbiogenesis called "The Origin of Mitosing [Eukaryotic] Cells," dealing with the origin of all cells except bacteria. (The origin of bacterial cells is the origin of life itself.) The paper was rejected by about fifteen scientific journals, because it was flawed; also, it was too new and nobody could evaluate it. Finally, James F. Danielli, the editor of The Journal of Theoretical Biology, accepted it and encouraged me. At the time, I was an absolute nobody, and, what was unheard of, this paper received eight hundred reprint requests. Later, at Boston University, it won an award for the year's best faculty publication. I was only an instructor at the time, so my Biology Department colleagues reacted to the commotion and threw a party. But it was more of "Isn't this cute," or "It's so abstruse that I don't understand it, but others think it worthy of attention." Even today most scientists still don't take symbiosis seriously as an evolutionary mechanism. If they were to take symbiogenesis seriously, they'd have to change their behavior. The only way behavior changes in science is that certain people die and differently behaving people take their places.
Next, expanding the journal article, after ten years of research and six weeks of intense writing, I produced a book called The Origin of Eukaryotic Cells. Even under contract, it was rejected by Academic Press. Finally, in 1970, the revised and improved work was published by Yale University Press. Now called Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, the most recent version of the statement is in a second — really a third — edition. Published by W.H. Freeman in 1993, that book is my life's work. It details the role of symbiosis in the evolution of cells, which leads directly to the origin of mitotic cell division and meiotic sexuality. My major thrust is how different bacteria form consortia that, under ecological pressures, associate and undergo metabolic and genetic change such that their tightly integrated communities result in individuality at a more complex level of organization. The case in point is the origin of nucleated (protoctist, animal, fungal, and plant) cells from bacteria.
While Gould and the others tend to believe that species only diverge from one another, I claim that — more important in generation of variation — species form new composite entities by fusion and merger. Symbiogenesis is an extremely important mechanism of evolution. Symbiogenesis analysis impacts on developmental biology, on taxonomy and systematics, and on cell biology; it hits some thirty subfields of biology, and even geology. Symbiogenesis has many implications, which is part of the reason it is controversial. Most people don't like to hear that what they have been doing all these years is barking up the wrong tree.
My argument is radical only to the extent that it inspires scientists to change their status quo about many issues. To take seriously our Five Kingdoms concept (the book by Karlene V. Schwartz and me is based on work by Robert H. Whittaker and Herbert F. Copeland) a school or a publisher would have to change its catalog. A supplier has to relabel all its drawers and cabinets. Departments must reorganize their budget items, and NASA, the National Science Foundation, and various museums have to change staff titles and program-planning committees. The change from "plants versus animals" to the five kingdoms (bacteria, protoctista, animals, fungi, and plants) has such a profound implication for every aspect of biology as a social activity that resistance to accept it abounds. Scientists and those who pay them have to dismiss or ignore this potential reorganization because accepting the shifting boundaries and new alliances is strange and costly. It is far easier to stay with obsolete intellectual categories.
For more than a billion years, the only life on this planet consisted of bacterial cells, which, lacking nuclei, are called prokaryotes, or prokaryotic cells. They looked very much alike, and from the human-centered vantage point seem boring. However, bacteria are the source of reproduction, photosynthesis, movement — indeed, all interesting features of life except perhaps speech! They're still with us in large diversity and numbers. They still rule Earth. At some point, a new more complex kind of cell appeared on the scene, the eukaryotic cell, of which plant and animal bodies are composed. These cells contain certain organelles, including nuclei. Eukaryotic cells with an individuated nucleus are the building blocks of all familiar large forms of life. How did that evolution revolution occur? How did the eukaryotic cell appear? Probably it was an invasion of predators, at the outset. It may have started when one sort of squirming bacterium invaded another — seeking food, of course. But certain invasions evolved into truces; associations once ferocious became benign. When swimming bacterial would-be invaders took up residence inside their sluggish hosts, this joining of forces created a new whole that was, in effect, far greater than the sum of its parts: faster swimmers capable of moving large numbers of genes evolved. Some of these newcomers were uniquely competent in the evolutionary struggle. Further bacterial associations were added on, as the modern cell evolved.
One kind of evidence in favor of symbiogenesis in cell origins is mitochondria, the organelles inside most eukaryotic cells, which have their own separate DNA. In addition to the nuclear DNA, which is the human genome, each of us also has mitochondrial DNA. Our mitochondria, a completely different lineage, are inherited only from our mothers. None of our mitochondrial DNA comes from our fathers. Thus, in every fungus, animal, or plant (and in most protoctists), at least two distinct genealogies exist side by side. That, in itself, is a clue that at some point these organelles were distinct microorganisms that joined forces.
David Luck and John Hall, research geneticists at Rockefeller University, recently made an astounding discovery that I more or less predicted twenty-five years ago. They demonstrated by well-developed techniques something they were not even seeking: a peculiar DNA — outside the nucleus of the cell, outside the chloroplast, and outside the mitochondria. This extranuclear DNA, these genes outside the nucleus, can be interpreted as remnants of ancient, invasive, squirming bacteria whose aggressive association presaged the merger.
If their discovery is correct — and at least three teams of researchers have disputed it — then the nonnuclear genetic system Hall and Luck revealed in green algae may represent the stripped-down remnants of bacteria inside all of us. The growth, reproduction, and communication of these moving, alliance-forming bacteria become isomorphic with our thought, with our happiness, our sensitivities and stimulations. If mine is a correct view, it organizes a great deal of knowledge. There are unambiguous ways of testing the main points. The implication is that we are literally inhabited by highly motile remnants of an ancient bacterial type that have become, in every sense, a part of ourselves. These thriving partial beings represent the physical basis of anima: soul, life, locomotion; an advocation of materialism in the crassest sense of the word. Put it this way: a purified chemical is prepared from brain and added to another purified chemical. These two chemicals — two different kinds of motile proteins — together crawl away, they locomote. They move all by themselves. Biochemists and cell biologists can show us the minimal common denominator of movement, locomotion. Anima. Soul. These moving proteins I interpret as the remains of the swimming bacteria incorporated by beings who became our ancestors as they became us.
The minimal-movement system is so physically and chemically characterizable that complete consensus exists that "motility proteins" are composed of typical carbon-hydrogen bonds, and so forth. All the details are agreed upon by cell biologists and biochemists. But I think an understanding of the extent to which the evolutionary origin involved symbiogenesis must be acknowledged. Such acknowledgment will lead to new awareness of the physical basis of thought. Thought and behavior in people are rendered far less mysterious when we realize that choice and sensitivity are already exquisitely developed in the microbial cells that became our ancestors. Even philosophers will be inspired to learn about motility proteins. Scientists and nonscientists will be motivated to learn enough chemistry, microbiology, evolutionary biology, and paleontology to understand the relevance of these fields to the deep questions they pose.
My primary work has always been in cell evolution, yet for a long time I've been associated with James Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis. In the early seventies, I was trying to align bacteria by their metabolic pathways. I noticed that all kinds of bacteria produced gases. Oxygen, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, ammonia — more than thirty different gases are given off by the bacteria whose evolutionary history I was keen to reconstruct. Why did every scientist I asked believe that atmospheric oxygen was a biological product but the other atmospheric gases — nitrogen, methane, sulfur, and so on — were not? "Go talk to Lovelock," at least four different scientists suggested. Lovelock believed that the gases in the atmosphere were biological. He had, by this time, a very good idea of which live organisms were probably "breathing out" the gases in question. These gases were far too abundant in the atmosphere to be formed by chemical and physical processes alone. He argued that the atmosphere was a physiological and not just a chemical system.
The Gaia hypothesis states that the temperature of the planet, the oxidation state and other chemistry of all of the gases of the lower atmosphere (except helium, argon, and other nonreactive ones) are produced and maintained by the sum of life. We explored how this could be. How could the temperature of the planet be regulated by living beings? How could the atmospheric gas composition — the 20-percent oxygen and the one to two parts per million methane, for example — be actively maintained by living matter?
It took me days of conversation even to begin to understand Lovelock's thinking. My first response, just like that of the neo-Darwinists, was "business as usual." I would say, "Oh, you mean that organisms adapt to their environment." He would respond, very sweetly, "No, I don't mean that." Lovelock kept telling me what he really meant, and it was hard for me to listen. Since his was a new idea, he hadn't yet developed an appropriate vocabulary. Perhaps I helped him work out his explanations, but I did very little else.
The Gaia hypothesis is a biological idea, but it's not human-centered. Those who want Gaia to be an Earth goddess for a cuddly, furry human environment find no solace in it. They tend to be critical or to misunderstand. They can buy into the theory only by misinterpreting it. Some critics are worried that the Gaia hypothesis says the environment will respond to any insults done to it and the natural systems will take care of the problems. This, they maintain, gives industries a license to pollute. Yes, Gaia will take care of itself; yes, environmental excesses will be ameliorated, but it's likely that such restoration of the environment will occur in a world devoid of people.
Lovelock would say that Earth is an organism. I disagree with this phraseology. No organism eats its own waste. I prefer to say that Earth is an ecosystem, one continuous enormous ecosystem composed of many component ecosystems. Lovelock's position is to let the people believe that Earth is an organism, because if they think it is just a pile of rocks they kick it, ignore it, and mistreat it. If they think Earth is an organism, they'll tend to treat it with respect. To me, this is a helpful cop-out, not science. Yet I do agree with Lovelock when he claims that most of the things scientists do are not science either. And I realize that by taking the stance he does he is more effective than I am in communicating Gaian ideas.
If science doesn't fit in with the cultural milieu, people dismiss science, they never reject their cultural milieu! If we are involved in science of which some aspects are not commensurate with the cultural milieu, then we are told that our science is flawed. I suspect that all people have cultural concepts into which science must fit. Although I try to recognize these biases in myself, I'm sure I cannot entirely avoid them. I try to focus on the direct observational aspects of science.
Gaia is a tough bitch — a system that has worked for over three billion years without people. This planet's surface and its atmosphere and environment will continue to evolve long after people and prejudice are gone.
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Excerpted from The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution by John Brockman (Simon & Schuster, 1995) . Copyright © 1995 by John Brockman. All rights reserved.
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REALITY CLUB DISCUSSION
niles_eldredge's picture
Niles Eldredge
Paleontologist; Author, Darwin
Lynn is marvelous. I hope I'm not being too Pollyanna-ish, but her notion of the symbiotic origin of the eukaryotic cell was probably the grandest idea in modern biology. Lynn was put down as having had a really crazy idea, and, of course, we can relate to that. Now it's taught in all the textbooks as the self-evident truth. It was a marvelous thing.
Her involvement with Gaia has been more messy. This is James Lovelock's notion that the earth is a living organism — at least that's the strong form of it. Her commentaries on evolutionary biology sometimes miss the mark. She, like me and a lot of other people, thinks that the metaphor of competition for reproductive success is overdone in the ultra-Darwinian paradigm; but, on the other hand, there's no question that there's competition in nature, and she's trying to stress cooperation.
marvin_minsky's picture
Marvin Minsky
Mathematician; computer scientist; Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT; cofounder, MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; author, The Emotion Machine
The animals we know today didn't evolve from scratch but, with the exception of bacteria, virtually all of them are fusions of three or four more primitive animals. That's how we got the way we are.
lee_smolin's picture
Lee Smolin
Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution
Lynn Margulis has been for many years one of my scientific heroes. She is, in my opinion, one of the great living American scientists. She has this ability, which I think of as the characteristic of the best scientists from the American tradition, of thinking in broadly significant and original ways while staying very close to nature — to the ground, so to speak. Richard Feynman was another like this. You couldn't speak to him about physics without speaking about nature. I can't judge her effect on biologists, except to say that I imagine most of them haven't yet caught up with her, but I can certainly say, as a physicist, that she's had a dramatic impact on how I think about biology. Three aspects of her vision — the importance of symbiosis in evolution, the Gaia hypothesis, and the view that the whole living world is an elaboration of microbial life — are, I believe, extremely important for understanding the relationship of the living world to the physical world at large.
I admired her for many years from her writings and from hearsay. I was very fortunate to meet her two years ago. At a dinner party, I witnessed her defend the Gaia hypothesis against what another biologist present had said in print. She had the unfortunate person cornered; she was able to quote, word for word from memory, what he'd said, and she was very intent on having him see why it was wrong. I must say that when I witnessed this conversation I was reminded of the accounts written of Galileo when he came to Rome, in which he is described as defending the Copernican hypothesis at dinner parties in the houses of the great families there. I saw in her the same confidence in her vision, together with impatience at those who can't think as openly or as broadly but instead choose to misunderstand the new ideas. I've thought for many years that we as yet barely understand the implications of Darwin's discovery that we evolved via natural selection. I'm sure that Lynn Margulis has seen further than most what this means for our view of the natural world and our relationship to it.
One thing I can't understand is the animosity among the different evolutionary theorists, such as Lynn Margulis, Richard Dawkins, and others. The idea that the world has evolved by variation and selection is, as far as I can tell, completely consistent with both the idea that symbiosis is a major mechanism of evolution and the idea that the whole biosphere functions as a single organism with mechanisms of self-regulation of climate and various cycles. It seems to me that rather than being contradictory, both aspects must be necessary. The living world must be a single self-organized entity to have come to exist at all, and the only way such complexity and astounding novelty can arise is by random variation and natural selection. As a physicist, I feel that the little we've so far been able to observe about how self-organized systems work points to the necessity of both aspects. For example, biologists seem to be endlessly arguing about the scale on which natural selection operates. Does it operate on the ecosystem, on the species, on the individual, on the gene? The one key lesson about self- organized systems that physicists have learned is that they're what we call critical systems, which are systems in which significant correlations are evolving on every possible scale. So the answer, I imagine, is that evolution must be taking place simultaneously on a large varieties of scales. Of course, the information is coded on one scale — that of the gene. But it's expressed over every scale from the individual cell to the biosphere as a whole. Thus, the probability that a gene will be reproduced is influenced by its effect on every scale, which means that evolution can act at every scale.
Of course, it would be good to have a general theory of self-organized systems which could serve as the starting point for such a discussion — and, indeed, for developing a general understanding of the biological world and its evolution. This has been a dream of physicists for a long time. It's certainly a dream of mine and of many other people. I think that just recently we can say we're beginning to uncover some concepts, such as self-organized criticality, which could play a role in such a theory.
george_c_williams's picture
George C. Williams
was an evolutionary biologist; professor emeritus of ecology
I'm probably being unfair, but I would say that Lynn Margulis is very much afflicted with a kind of "God-is- good" syndrome, in that she wants to look out there at nature and see something benign and benevolent and ultimately wholesome and worth having. Whereas I look out there with Tennyson and see things red in tooth and claw. In other words, it's a bloody mess out there.
She likes to look out there and see cooperation and things being nice to each other. This culminates in this Gaia idea. There's this entity — we will not make it a god or a goddess, let's say that the implication is just a metaphor. But that's what she wants to see, and therefore, come what may, that's what she's going to see. She could say the same about me — that I think "God is evil," and I look out there at His creations and see nothing but evil. Time will tell, and will show that my approach is more fruitful in generating predictions about discoveries we're going to make.
daniel_c_dennett's picture
Daniel C. Dennett
Philosopher; Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, From Bacteria to Bach and Back
One of the most beautiful ideas I've ever encountered is Lynn Margulis's idea about the birth of the eukaryotic cell through a transformation of what started out as a parasitic infestation of one cell by another. When she first proposed it, she was scoffed at, laughed at, and it's delicious that this is now pretty well accepted as a major, major theoretical development. I think of her as one of the heroes of twentieth-century biology.
Some of her recent popular writing disturbs me, because I think she's trying to take that wonderful idea and harness it as a political idea, stressing cooperation over competition. But that seems to me to be a mistake. Yes, the eukaryotic revolution was an instance in which what began as competition evolved into what is fundamentally a cooperative arrangement. That's its beauty, but precisely what it doesn't show is that cooperation is the norm or that cooperation is always good or that it's always possible. It's the rare and wonderful thing that enabled multicellular life to take off. But you can't read into it any message such as that nature is fundamentally cooperation; it isn't.
w_daniel_hillis's picture
W. Daniel Hillis
Physicist, Computer Scientist, Co-Founder, Applied Invention.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone
Most of the science that gets done gets done within a rigid set of rules, where you know exactly who your peers are, and things get evaluated according to a very strict set of standards. That works, when you're not trying to change the structure. It works in what Stephen Gould calls incremental science. But when you try to change the structure, that system doesn't work very well. When you try to do something that doesn't fit into a discipline or a standard theory, you usually make some enemies. Lynn Margulis is an example of somebody who didn't follow the rules and pissed a lot of people off.
She had a way of looking at symbiosis which didn't fit into the popular theories and structure. In the minds of many people, she went around the powers that be and took her theories directly to the public, which annoyed them all. It particularly annoyed them because she turned out to be right. If it's a sin to take your theories to the public, then it is a double sin to take your theories to the public and be right.
francisco_varela's picture
Francisco Varela
biologist; director of research at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, and professor of cognitive science
I consider Lynn Margulis one of the brightest and most important biologists since the geneticists of the 1920s, when Thomas H. Morgan and J.B.S. Haldane contributed to setting the basis of evolutionary biology on cellular grounds.
Since then, the single interesting piece that puts biology together at all levels — from geology to cell biology to molecular biology to evolution — is Lynn. One of the key ideas she introduced in the 1970s was evolution by symbiosis. Nobody believed her. By now that idea is pretty well established, and it's opened up a new way of thinking about the relationships we see in microorganisms. It also helps us to understand the importance of the microworld. She's very original. Her book Symbiosis in Cell Evolution is one of the classics of biology in the twentieth century.
I do have some criticisms. In recent years, she has taken some of her important scientific ideas into a more cultural sphere, towards a human cultural interpretation. This is bad. Her story on the origins of sex, in Mystery Dance, written with Dorion Sagan, for example, is naive, full of clichés, and devoid of historical perspective. I read Richard Dawkins' famous attack in his review in Nature, and I must say that for once I agree entirely with Dawkins. It's unfortunate that she has veered into some weird second stage.
One of the reasons I got to know her is that she was one of the first biologists who appreciated the work I did with Humberto Maturana back in the seventies, on understanding the basic biological cellular organization of an autopoietic system. She immediately took it up and incorporated it into her work. That was very important to me, because it meant that I was not, as we say in Spanish, completely outside the pot.
richard_dawkins's picture
Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary Biologist; Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford; Author, Books Do Furnish a Life
I greatly admire Lynn Margulis's sheer courage and stamina in sticking by the endosymbiosis theory, and carrying it through from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy. I'm referring to the theory that the eukaryotic cell is a symbiotic union of primitive prokaryotic cells. This is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, and I greatly admire her for it.
I first met Lynn some years ago at a conference in the South of France, and I think we got on rather well together. I have since, when I've met her, found her extremely obstinate in argument. I have the feeling that she's the kind of person who just knows she's right and doesn't listen to argument. Whereas I think I actually do listen — and perhaps change my mind if someone presents a convincing argument — I get the feeling that she does not. That may be unfair, and in the case of the theory of the origin of the eukaryotic cell, she was right to be obstinate. She's turned out, probably, to be right, but that doesn't mean she's always right. And I suspect that she isn't always right.
The Gaia hypothesis is a good example of that. I don't think Lovelock was clear — in his first book, at least — on the kind of natural-selection process that was supposed to put together the adaptive unit, which in his case was the whole world. If you're going to talk about a unit at any level in the hierarchy of life as being adaptive, then there has to be some sort of selection going on among self-replicating information. And we have to ask, What is the equivalent of DNA? What are the units of code? What are the units of copy-me code which are being replicated?
I don't think for a moment that it occurred to Lovelock to ask himself that question. And so I'm skeptical of the rhetoric of the Gaia hypothesis, when it comes down to particular applications of it, like explaining the amount of methane there is in the atmosphere, or saying there will be some gas produced by bacteria which is good for the world at large and so the bacteria go to the trouble of producing it, for the good of the world. That can't happen in a Darwinian world, as long as we think that natural selection is going on at the level of individual bacterial genes. Because those individual bacteria who don't put themselves to the trouble of manufacturing this gas for the good of the world will do better. Of course, if the individual bacteria who manufacture the gas are really doing themselves better by doing so, and the gas is just an incidental consequence, obviously I have no problem with that, but in that case you don't need a Gaia hypothesis to explain it. You explain it at the level of what's good for the individual bacteria and their genes.
fifth discipline summary
https://www.mudamasters.com/en/change-management/fifth-discipline-psenge-summary
The Fifth Discipline - P.Senge (summary)
The Fifth Discipline
The title of Peter Senge´s book the Fifth Discipline cites one of the five Disciplines to create a Learning Organization. These five disciplines: A shared Vision (1), Mental Models (2), Team Learning (3), Personal Mastery (4) and System Thinking (5).The fifth Discipline, System Thinking, is the one discipline that binds the other four and therefore the discipline where the focus of Change Management should be.
The 5 disciplines will shortly be addressed in this article, as well as three levels of explanations, seven learning constraints and nine system archetypes which will help practicing Systems Thinking.
THE FIVE DISCIPLINES OF CREATING A LEARNING ORGANIZATION in more detail, are:
── Personal Mastery describes the strength of people to be proactive and keep on learning to continuously achieve results which are important for them. Two factors which are of importance in this discipline are: defining what is important to us (1) and being able to see the current reality as it is (2).
── Mental Models describe the presumptions and generalizations people have which influence their actions. The first step in having people change their Mental Models is to have people reflect on their own behavior and beliefs. One of the mental models in every organization is the official hierarchy.
── Personal values can overcome the shortcomings of hierarchical power. One important Value Senge describes is openness. One part of openness is to quit playing ´power games´ and be open and honest about what your real needs are.
── A Shared Vision means all employees in a company share the same vision of where the organization needs to go (instead of a vision-statement where management has written where the organization should be going). Only when the vision is authentic and shared, employees will automatically participate in the improvement processes to get the company closer to accomplishing its vision. Senge describes a shared vision as follows: People are not playing according to the rules of the game, but feed [feel] responsible for the game.
── Team learning includes two aspects. Effective teamwork leads to results which individuals could not have achieved on their own (1) and individuals within a team learn more and faster than they would have without the team (2). The team members have to be willing to shift their mental models and be open to learn from their colleagues.
── System Thinking is used to analyze patterns in an organization by looking at it from a holistic viewpoint rather than small unrelated manageable parts. Senge himself describes the elephant metaphor. When you split an elephant in two, you do not have two small elephants which you can take care of. You can only take care of the one complete elephant. An organization is like a living organism and should according to Senge also be managed as one. This discipline integrates the previous 4.
One way in which systems thinking is executed is the way in which situations are explained by employees. Senge describes THREE LEVELS OF EXPLAINATION: a reactive explanation based on events (1), a responsive explanation based on behavior (2) and a generative explanation based on structural level (3). These three ways of explaining are linked to one another. A System (level 3) leads to a certain behaviors (level 2) which can lead to certain events (level 1). The best way to change events is therefore to change the system, which will lead to different behavior.
Lifelong learning is important for an organization because learning results in creating. The more people in an organization learn, the more value they can create for the company. Traditionally there are SEVEN LEARNING CONSTRAINTS.
── The first one is the I-am-my-position syndrome. This syndrome is described by people talking about what tasks they perform in an organization instead of what value they add to the company goal. Talking in terms of tasks only results in lack of accountability for the product or service the company delivers.
── The second constraint for learning is the result from the first syndrome and is called the enemy is there syndrome. When people are task-focused, they are likely to not able to see their own influence on the company goals and as a result point to others in organization as the root cause of all problems.
── The illusion of taking charge is the third constraint for learning, and describes the danger of reactive action instead of proactive action. Proactive action is defined by people daring to face the results of their own behavior and the willingness to change it to prevent problems from reoccurring in the future.
── The forth constraint is the fixation on events instead of focus on small continuous improvements. Learning and improving should be part of everybody´s daily job and not just a temporary one day event or a project. Projects, by definition, are temporary and project teams are eliminated after a certain problem is solved.
── Constraint five is the parable of the boiled frog. A Frog held in a pan in which the water temperature slowly increases will die as soon as the water eventually boils, because the frog will not notice the temperature increase. To prevent this from happening to organizations in changing environments, changes of processes should be measured and evaluated.
The delusion of learning from experience is described because people seldom really know the outcome of their actions on the long term, while we tend to believe that we can know the long term outcome by looking at the short term outcome.
── The final constraint Senge describes is the myth of the management team in which people truly believe that management can solve all problems. When one thinks about it, it is obviously impossible that one manager knows everything about all processes and has all capabilities needed to solve each problem.
As a starting point for systems thinking, Senge describes 9 SYSTEM ARCHETYPES or behavior patterns which deserve management’s attention:
There is always a delay between the execution of actions and the final (long-term) results.
── A pattern of limited growth is the result of focusing on improving activities which focus on improving growth accelerating factors instead of reducing growth limiting factors.
── Moving the problem instead of solving it. This is what happens when only symptoms of the problem are addressed and not the root cause, The problem can than re-occur, in the same form but also in another department.
── Deteriorating Goals when situations get tuff. Goals are set aside due to a crisis or because of any other reason. This is simply not acceptable. The vision and its goals give direction to the company, especially in these difficult times!
── An escalation loop is a loop in which actors influence one another with a lose-lose situation as outcome. An example is a price-war between supermarkets, where multiple competitors eventually fight one another on being the cheapest, and none of them ends up with profit in the end. According to Senge, one should only encourage a culture in which win-win situations are created.
── Success to the successful is the archetype in which resources are allocated to the most successful activity which makes the unsuccessful ones even more unsuccessful because they receive fewer resources. This is not necessarily the best policy fir the long term.
── The politics to receive resources (for instance the budgeting game) is a situation where departments make up and alter numbers to receive more resources for their department instead of being able to see the scope of the entire organization and act accordingly.
── Solutions which do not solve, is a situation where short terms positive results lead to long term losses. For instance reducing Preventative maintenance on machines in a factory.
── Growth and underinvestment, is the trap where investing does not seem necessary because all is well at the moment. Not investing today, however, might lead to a lost opportunity for growth in the future because of a lack of skills or capacity.
In the Fifth Discipline (which is Systems Thinking) Senge encourages managers to look at problems from a holistic perspective. Stop trying to divide problems into smaller pieces and then try to solve each part. The metaphor Senge uses is the example of the broken mirror. When all small pieces of a broken mirror are glued back together, the reflection of the mirror will not be the same as the reflection from the originally unbroken mirror.
Within Systems Thinking, the in this article described nine archetypes can help to prevent common situations from happening and focus on improving the organization as a whole. It is the Principle which brings the other four principles together: Shared Vision, Mental Models, Team Learning and Personal Mastery.
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By Russell L. Ackoff
Pre-active-ists recognize that the roots of crime lie in society, in social conditions such as poverty, discrimination, poor heath, lack of education, and substandard and congested housing. But they do not believe that these conditions can be changed quickly enough to affect the crisis in crime. Thus, as pre-active-ists normally do, they accept the environment and seek to reform the criminal justice system within it. The inter-active-ist, on the other hand, does not believe that even the reforms proposed by pre-active-ists are possible without some fundamental changes in society. He does not believe, for example, that the money required to carry out pre-active reforms can be extracted out of our society as it currently operates. Therefore, the inter-active-ist does not believe that changes in society and the criminal justice system are separable [se-parable].
The inter-active-ist assumes a more aggressive posture toward the social environment of crime than the pre-active-ist does. He tries to use the crisis in crime to bring about changes in those aspects of society that breed it. He believes society needs correction even more than the criminal does, and that correcting the criminal without correcting the conditions that breed criminality cannot significantly reduce crime. This orientation leads to an inversion of the problems usually associated with criminal justice. The most fundamental of such transformations is that involving the concept of responsibility of such transformations is that involving the concept of responsibility for crime.
Recall that the re-active-ist believes the criminal to be exclusively or primarily responsible for the crime he commits. The pre-active-ist believes that the individual and his environment are jointly responsible for most crimes and, therefore, that criminality is like a disease: the germs must be there in the environment and the individual must be susceptible to them. The inter-active-ist, on the other hand, holds society primarily responsible for crime. He takes the individual's susceptibility to crime to be a product of social influences--an acquired characteristic, not an innate disposition.
Therefore, the inter-active-ist develops a strategy for treating the criminal that is based on the assumption that HIS CRIMINAL ACT is the Consequence of a crime COMMITTED by Society against HIM. Then, a person steals to avert starvation, for example, the threat of starvation is taken to be a social crime that requires more attention than the individual theft does. Such crimes can only be significantly reduced by eliminating the possibility of starvation. Race rioting can only be eliminated by removing racial discrimination. This view does NOT imply that the individual criminal requires no treatment but that the treatment he receives is directed to undoing the damage that has been done to him.
The inter-active-ist believes that justice should be more concerned with protecting the individual from society than with protecting society from the criminal. If the criminal is taken to be one whom society has wronged, then the justice system should protect him from further abuse by society. Because the inter-active-ist takes the principal function of the criminal justice system to be the CORRECTION of SOCIETY, punishment of either the criminal or society is irrelevant.
(Ackoff's best : his classic writings on management, Russell L. Ackoff., © 1999, pp.193-194.)
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By Russell L. Ackoff
pp.204-205
Police
Pre-active-ist have suggested many possible reforms that would increase the effectiveness of the police. Most of these are directed at raising the rate of apprehension of offenders, not at crime prevention. Crime prevention has never been a central function of the police. The inter-active-ist believes it should be, hence advocates creation of a new prevention police force. The preventive police officer (man or woman) would have no power of law enforcement or arrest. He would not be armed in any way. But he would be conspicuously uniformed so that he could be easily identified.
The preventive policeman's principal function would require his getting to know the neighborhood to which is assigned and the people in it. To facilitate this process, he would be required to live in that neighborhood. The neighborhood should be small enough so that he can cover all of it on foot or bicycle. He would be there to help people or to help them get help whenever they needed it. He would be expected to know and understand the conditions in his neighborhood that breed crime and thus direct the activities of appropriate public and private agencies to their correction. His activity in the community would be completely positive--oriented to making it a better place in which to live.
When he sees criminality developing he would take corrective action, but if apprehension or forceful intervention is required, he would call on others to perform it.
This preventive policeman should be able to be contacted by anyone in his area at any time, day or night. When someone in his area is arrested he would be responsible for being sure the one apprehended knows his rights and receives whatever assistance he requires; for example, that proper legal aid is avaible. He would similarly help any ex-convicts who return to his area.
He would work with schools, clubs, and other organizations in the community to help make it as self-policing an area as possible. Put another way, his principal function would be to protect people from society and other who might abuse or misuse them. The preventive officer would testify in court on the crime-producing conditions operating on anyone form his area who is being tried for a crime. He would serve as a witness against the state, not as a witness for it.
The preventive policeman would require all the skills and training of a social worker and more, but his orientation would not be toward the alleviation of suffering so much as toward the removal of its causes.
(Ackoff's best : his classic writings on management, Russell L. Ackoff., © 1999, pp.204-205.)
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By Russell L. Ackoff
Tricks or Treat
treatment
pp.195-196
Types of Treatment
The treatment of an offender is a resultant of the type of facility used and the way it is managed. <skip a sentence> These, taken in relation to the perspectives of society on the offender, may be said to comprise philosophies of correction.
1. Deterrent (controlling). Such treatment is intended to prevent aggression or destruction in or out of a facility, at the time of detention or subsequently. The threat of punishment for doing something and the promise of reward for not doing it are both deterrents, or are intended to be so.
2. Clinical (therapeutic). Such treatment is intended to cure, reduce, or stabilize physical or mental illness, or a character defect recognized as pathological and believed to be actually or potentially responsible for self-destructive or anti-social behavior.
3. Supportive (protecting). Such treatment is intended to remove its recipient from anti-social influences or forces applied to him that he cannot resist except at great cost or risk; to protect him from threats of harm; and to provide him with physical and emotional care of which he has been deprived and which he needs.
Actual treatments frequently blend these pure types in varying proportions. Some clinical procedures, for example, require a good deal of control as well as support, especially at some stages.
Deterrence, therapy, and support do not in themselves necessarily require the placement of anyone in a closed facility. Security, therefore, ought not to be looked at as an aspect of treatment.
Very different types of offender may sometimes need some security. Few are likely to need a high degree of it all the time. Security measures are required in case other methods of control break down. The first task, therefore, is to ensure that these other methods, which should be an inherent part of facility's organization and management, are well designed and are in fact working as well as possible. Physical security becomes necessary only insofar as social security breaks down. If a facility's staff is able to maintain it as an open facility, there is no need for a perimeter.
Security measures may be required to safeguard either the boundary of a facility or to protect groups or individuals inside from each other or from themselves. There level of security maintained should depend in either case on the frequency expected in the breakdown of social controls. Physical security should be a reserve system, for emergency use only. Where the emergencies become too frequent the ground rules of the social control system have to be changed.
(Ackoff's best : his classic writings on management, Russell L. Ackoff., © 1999, pp.195-196.)
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Copy (cut) and Paste Text #RLA
Gregorian Calendar
initiate 7/12/2013
update 7/13/2013
May 26, 2004
TRANSFORMING THE SYSTEMS MOVEMENT
By Russell L. Ackoff
(edited)
The situation the world is in is a mess.
Reform and Transform
1. Reformations and transformations are not the same thing. Reformations are concerned with changing the means systems employ to pursue their objectives. ([ changing the way the systems go after objectives ]) ([ changing the method and the process ])
2. Transformations involve changes in the objectives they pursue. ([ changes in the objectives ]) ([ changing the objective ])
3. Peter Drucker put this distinction dramatically when he said there is a difference between
3a. doing things right
(the intent of reformations)
and
3b. doing the right thing
(the intent of transformations).
Reformations and transformations are not the same thing.
Reformations are concerned with changing the means systems employ to pursue their objectives. Transformations involve changes in the objectives they pursue.
Peter Drucker put this distinction dramatically when he said there is a difference between doing things right (the intent of reformations) and doing the right thing (the intent of transformations).
([ does this mean we have been firing at the wrong target all these time ]) ([ it means placing a ladder up the wrong tree will let you to climb to the top of the wrong tree easier. Or climbing the ladder place on the wrong tree will get you to the top, the top is still the top, and that should count for some thing.
“If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”
--Stephen R. Covey.
])
DEVELOPMENT VERSUS GROWTH
[“ quality of life ” versus “standard of living”]
Rubbish heaps grow but do not develop.
Some nations grow larger without developing and others develop without growing.
1. Growth is an increase in size or number.
Development is an increase in competence,
the ability to satisfy ones needs and
desires and
those of others.
2. Growth is a matter of EARNing;
development is a matter of LEARNing.
3. Standard of living is an index of national growth;
“ quality of life ” is an index of its development.
4. Development is not a matter of how much one has but
how much one can do
with whatever one has.
4a. “ Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel laureate in Economics, proved this using the example of India. He was able to demonstrate that social disparities and badly functioning public institution and infrastructure in this country are primarily responsible for destitution and underdevelopment. In this sense, governance problems and a lack of political will have to be held accountable for turning population growth into a real development problem. ”*1
5. This is why Robinson Crusoe is a better model of development than J. Pierpont Morgan.
Because development is a matter of learning, one cannot do it for another. The only kind of development possible is self-development. However, one can facilitate the development of another by encouraging and supporting their learning. Nations must stop acting as though they can solve other nations' problems. Nations, like individuals, learn less from the successes of others than from their own mistakes.
One never learns from doing things right because, obviously, one already knows how to do it. What one derives from doing something right is confirmation of what one already knows. This has value, but it is not learning. One can only learn from mistakes, by identifying and correcting them. But all through school and in most places of employment we are taught that making mistakes is a bad thing. Therefore, we try to hide or deny those we make. To the extent we succeed, we preclude learning.
Corporate Myth
Corporations REAL principal objective
is to maximize
(1) the security,
(2) standard of living, and
(3) quality of life
of those making the decisions,
witness Enron and WorldCom,
base on a study conducted a while back at GE.
Principal objective of corporations is to maximize the security, standard of living, and quality of life of those making the decisions, not usually those that are proclaimed.
For example, most corporation proclaim maximization of shareholder value as their primary objective.
University Myth
One could mistakenly believe that the principal objective of universities is to educate students.
What a myth!
The principal objective of a university is
(1) to provide job security and
(2) increase the standard of living and
(3) quality of life of those members
of the faculty and administration who make the critical decisions.
The principal objective of a university is to provide job security and increase the standard of living and quality of life of those members of the faculty and administration who make the critical decisions.
Note that the more senior and politically powerful teaching members of the faculty are, the less teaching they do.
Faculty members know how to learn better than they know how to teach. Therefore, they should be acting as resources to students who are either engaged in teaching others, or learning on their own or with others cooperatively.
One of the great gifts I received from West Churchman, whose life we will remember and celebrate tonight, is that he let me go through graduate school teaching most of the courses I needed to take for graduation.
([ can I say the same thing about the military-industrial-complex, and
the national-security-technology-for-all-my-problem-complex, or, are they the same entity?
No, they have overlapping parts.
The principal objective of the [unamed organization, system, or sub-system] is
(1) to provide job security and
(2) increase the standard of living and
(3) quality of life of those members
of the ... and administration who make the critical decisions.
])
([
To generalize and to view it from one optic, the purpose of a system is
to maintain
(1) safety and security,
to improve the
(2) “ quality of life, ” and
to increase the
(3) “standard of living”
of the members making the critical decisions.
Cui bono, Latin for “to whose benefit?”, literally “as a benefit to whom?”
])
On Democracy
Democracy has to be learned. It cannot be imposed on others. It must be learned by experiencing it. It does not come to us naturally. All of us are brought up by adults who, even in permissive families, are authorities who control us or set limits within which we have freedom. In effect, we are raised in autocratic structures however benevolent they may be. Therefore, in a sense autocracy is more natural than democracy.
I was once involved in a project in Mexico which taught me how democracy could be learned. A group of us from several Mexican universities and a government agency were able to make available to a very remote Indian village in the Sierra Madras Mountains a substantial sum of money the village could use for its development. It alone had to make the decisions as to how to use the money of which I was a part had was to veto any decisions not made democratically and which did not involve development. Town meetings were initiated in the square in the center of the village, and after a series of tries the village members learned how to make decisions democratically. They also learned and difference between development and welfare.
On Prisons
The United States has a higher percentage of its population in prison than any other country, and simultaneously has the highest crime rate. We have more people in prison than are attending college and universities, and it cost more per year to incarcerate them than to educate them. Something is fundamentally wrong.
Most who are imprisoned are subsequently released. As criminologists have shown those released have a higher probability of committing a crime when they come out than when they went in, and it is likely to be a more serious crime. Prison is a school for learning criminality, not a correctional institution.
On US health care system
In quality the health care system of the United States is ranked 37th by the World Health Organization. We are the only developed country without universal coverage; about 42 million people in our country have no health care assured. Moreover, study after study has shown that much of the need for the care that is provided is created by the care that is given; excess surgery, incorrect diagnoses, wrong drugs prescribed or administered, unnecessary tests.
The fact is that the so-called health care system can survive only as long as there are people who are sick or disabled. Therefore, whatever the intent of its servers, the system can only assure its survival by creating and preserving illness and disability. We have a self-maintaining sickness- and disability-care system, not a health care system.
( By Robert Steele, Western governments have been corrupted by the medical industry that wishes only to focus on the Surgical and Pharmaceutical Remediation aspect of public health, because that is where the private profits are to be found. ([in this case, if you want to know why the system is broke, you follow the money; ...]) )
“systemic thinking”
Systemic thinking is holistic versus reductionistic thinking, synthetic versus analytic. Reductionistic and analytic thinking derives properties of wholes from the properties of their parts. Holistic and synthetic thinking derive properties of parts from properties of the whole that contains them. The creation of the department of Homeland Security is a prime example of reductionistic and analytical thinking; the whole formed by the aggregation of existing parts. In contrast, when an architect designs a house he first sketches the house as a whole and then puts rooms into it. The principal criterion he employs in evaluating a room is what effect it has on the whole. He is even willing to make a room worse if doing so will make the house better.
In general, those who make public policy and engage in public decision making do not understand that improvement in the performance of parts of a system taken separately may not, and usually does not, improve performance of the system as a whole. In fact, it may make system performance worse or even destroy it.
([ I would add, imagine holistic medicine versus reductionistic and analytic medicine. Would you treat your self, the heart, the mind, the body and every thing else using a holistic approach or in a reductionistic/analytic approach? Both? Neither? Hybrid? or what ever works. or how about eating right, living right, and not getting sick in the first place, and not living next to a pollution emitting facilities. ])
Source:
Russell Ackoff,
Transforming the Systems Movement(RLAConfPaper).pdf
online, 26 May 2004.
Note:
*1 famine, nutrition, water (OW)
pp.258-259
Famine, malnutrition, and a lack of drinking water have completely different causes. Simon Kuznets, the 1971 Nobel laureate in Economics, rightly posed the question of why population growth would have to impede economic growth. Automatically equating a growing population figure with economic problems stems from a point of view propagated two centuries ago by Thomas R. Malthus and his followers. In reality, a fatal relationship -- as postulated by Malthus -- does not exist. Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel laureate in Economics, proved this using the example of India. He was able to demonstrate that social disparities and badly functioning public institution and infrastructure in this country are primarily responsible for destitution and underdevelopment. In this sense, governance problems and a lack of political will have to be held accountable for turning population growth into a real development problem.
A series of scientific studies have shown that population growth is not generally the cause of poverty and underdevelopment. But rapid population growth exacerbates the search for solutions, and overtaxes existing infrastructure capacities and the ability of the labour markets to absorb a growing workforce. As a result, an increasing number of people in rapidly growing societies have no possibility of attending school or accessing medical care in the event of an illness or during pregnancy.
There may well be some sort of a demographic poverty trap in the least developed countries.
(Overcrowded World, Wie schnell wächst die Zahl der Menschen?Weltbevölkerung and weltweite Migration, Overcrowded World?, Global Population and International Migration, By Rainer Münz and Albert F. Reiterer, © 2007, English translation copyright © Julia Schweizer 2009, pp.258-259)
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