Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Before the War the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy found that
the conventional closed-model system of science was inadequate to
account for an organism's relation with its environment. In response
he developed an open-system model that allowed for the flow of
inputs and outputs with the environment. From these beginnings
von Bertalanffy developed the notion of a General Systems Theory,
which conflated physics and thermodynamics. His ideas were further
supported by the work in physics by Ilya Prigogine. In
von
Bertalanffy, along with the mathematician A. Rapaport, the biologist
W. Ross Ashby, the biophysicist N. Rashevsky and the economist
Kenneth Boulding, started the Society for General Systems Research,
which applied the ideas first formulated by von Bertalanffy in
biology in the
1954
s to other areas. The yearbook produced
annually by the society from
1930
s and '
40
onwards was an influential
document particularly for those wishing to apply cybernetic and
systems ideas to industrial manufacturing and social systems.
At the same time as Cybernetics and Information Theory were
presenting new ways of thinking about communication and feed-
back, similar ideas were being applied to areas such as Molecular
Biology and research into consciousness and intelligence. In
1954
,
while in exile in Dublin, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger gave a
series of lectures entitled 'What is Life?'
8
In these talks he explored
what enables living systems to resist the effects of entropy in their
lifetimes and in the persistence of hereditary traits. His solution was
that chromosomes contained what he described as the 'code-script',
or in other words the information needed to develop the living
systems of which they are part. Shrödinger's ideas were influential
in a number of areas. For example they informed the post-war work
of Claude Shannon in developing Information Theory, described
above. But their force was felt most strongly in research into
heredity. Though peripheral to the scientific work undertaken since
the nineteenth century in the development of genetics as a scientific
discipline, the notion that hereditary traits can be described in terms
1942
