BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

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EXAPTATION 2)5)

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Any adaptation that results of the posterior use of some feature arisen formerly

This neologism (I. TATTERSALL, 2001, p. 45) refers to the evolutive emergence of new useful functions in living beings which use some randomly appeared features which had no obvious utility to begin with.

He writes: "This is a useful name for characteristics that arise in one context before being exploited in another, or for the process by which such novelties are adopted in populations"

And "the classic example of exaptation becoming adaptation is birds' feathers. These structures are essential nowadays to bird flight, but for millions of years before flight came along, they where apparently used simply as insulators (and maybe for nothing much at all before that)" (p. 43)

Tattersall gives another example:

"… we have no idea at all about how the brain converts a mass of electrical and chemical signals into what we are individually familiar with as consciousness and thought patterns" (ibid. p. 45)

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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