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.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

TOTIPOTENCY 1)

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Ability of some undifferentiated elements to generate a new complete system or subsystem.

The first demonstration of this strange systemic property was DE VRIES' experiment of dividing an urchin embryo and obtain two perfectly constituted urchins from the separated parts. The same process is now currently applied in botany in order to obtain from meristemes a number of genetically identical plants.

The regeneration of some animal parts when severed (for instance in lizards) seems to show that, in some cases, some cells of mature living systems may return to totipotencial undifferentiation (Demonstrated in 1997 through the successful cloning of the ewe "Dolly" in Edinburgh).

A different, but also regenerating process is the spontaneaous local reconstruction of a partly disabled network, as for instance in a brain after a not too severe cerebral haemorrhage.

It would be interesting to investigate the relation – if any – of totipotency with holographic processes.

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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