Back to Basics

Newsflash: When humans arrived here on earth (it does not matter how long ago that was) they found a system that was working perfectly in balance -- as all natural systems do. Because of our experience with systems that fail we can be forgiven for believing than the fate of a system depends on how well humans manage it. But one only has to look at the cosmos to realize how far off the mark that view is.

Our appreciation of this fact is often clouded by our inability, or is it our unwillingness, to differentiate between living systems and non-living systems. Most of us have heard of stars that die apparently with no outside intervention, so it is obvious that some systems have a limited life cycle. This has caused us to erroneously conclude, at least subconsciously, that all systems, living or non-living, need maintenance if they are to survive.

Dying stars do not represent the standard for all systems. They only represent non-living systems. Of course, any living systems that are a part of that star would also die but their death would have been caused by extraneous sources. We can say that living systems are immortal by design because they perpetuate their existence through the "miracle" of procreation. The father of modern General Systems Theory, the Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972), was absolutely correct when he defined a system as “an entity which maintains its existence through the mutual interaction of its parts." Provisionally, the primary inference we can make from this definition is that the death of any living system always comes from the outside.

This inference can only be provisional because of another characteristic of a system that is often glossed over: that every component of a system is also a system. This means that every individual organism in a system is also defined as a system. This is something of a problem because while we are positing that living systems are immortal by design, we also have experiential knowledge that every living organism has a limited life span. The only obvious conclusion is that whereas the system which is the species is immortal by design through procreation, the system which is the individual has a limited life span.