Systems Theory
Historical Features of Science
About 400 years ago or so, the study of science began to influence our understanding of how this world works. Science tried to explain the way the world worked as if it was a big machine. We often work on parts of a machine, so scientists studied each component or part of the world separately to understand it. Scientists believed that improving some component would improve the whole. For many years that approach made sense and provided us with the answers we needed. The approach was so successful that it was borrowed by industry. Industry increased its ability to make products through assembly line factories and managers. The idea then moved to schools which developed grade levels, lesson objectives, and an institutional structure based on a hierarchy. We came to believe that 1) we can break things into individual pieces and work on one part or component at a time and 2) that we can accurately predict what we will create from putting the new parts together.
Science in this century
During the past 100 years science has come to a different understanding of how the world works. Ideas that challenged this notion of the world as a machine first showed up the study of atoms in physics. Biology, especially the study of ecology, further challenged the idea that you can look separately at one part at a time. It became clear that relationships or interactions between the parts played a stronger role than previously realized. These interactions were not always predictable. In the past scientists were certain that they could predict that taking action "X" would always result in action "Y." New discoveries told scientists that the world worked in more complex ways than originally thought. These new understandings led to a different approach to looking at how the world works -- the systems approach. Understanding the interactions or relationships between the parts became more important than the study of the individual parts. What was more exciting was that scientists were finding that often the parts interacted to create something more than expected. This became known as synergy - the end result is greater than the sum of its parts.
A systems approach
This focus on the interaction between parts and the larger whole become known as a systems approach. Scientists began to understand that natural communities (forests, fields, deserts, etc.) should be studied not like a machine, looking at individual parts. Rather the study of thesse complex communities should be approached as if they were like spider webs. In a spider web activity on one part of the web can be felt on other parts. Similarly scientists were finding that actions taken on one part of a forest (or field, etc.) might have multiple reactions, some not always apparent. For example, our use of DDT in the 1960's as an insecticide was very effective at killing insects, but resulted in the unexpected consequence of killing bald eagles because the shells of the eggs protecting the eagle embryos were too thin. The interconnected strands of the spider web are a model for the interconnected interactions found in the natural world. As described in the next page, a systems approach was then considered for explaining human interactions.
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