Systems Thinking, 3rd Edition

Chapter three. Sociocultural System

Self-organization or movement toward a predefined order is the key for understanding the process of social change. This is a conception shared by all four contemporary theories: quantum theory, living systems theory, chaos theory, and systems theory. For more than a century, the only theory that science has offered to explain how this stunning organized complexity arose is natural selection. But in crafting the living world, selection has always acted on systems that exhibit spontaneous order. Formation of this underlying order further honed by selection needs to be explain as well. Natural tendency to self-organize must have been present in the formation of initial order. To live is to know. The process of ...