Reductionism can mean either (a) an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or (b) a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents. This can be said of objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings.

Reductionism strongly reflects a certain perspective on causality. In a reductionist framework, phenomena that can be explained completely in terms of relations between other more fundamental phenomena, are called epiphenomena. Often there is an implication that the epiphenomenon exerts no causal agency on the fundamental phenomena that explain it.

Reductionism does not preclude the existence of what might be called emergent phenomena, but it does imply the ability to understand those phenomena completely in terms of the processes from which they are composed. This reductionist understanding is very different from that usually implied by the term 'emergence', which typically intends that what emerges is more than the sum of the processes from which it emerges.

Religious reductionism generally attempts to explains religion by boiling it down to certain nonreligious causes. A few examples of reductionistic explanations for the presence of religion are: that religion can be reduced to humanity's conceptions of right and wrong, that religion is fundamentally a primitive attempt at controlling our environments, and that religion is a way to explain the existence of a physical world. Anthropologists Edward Burnett Tylor and James George Frazer employed some religious reductionist arguments. Sigmund Freud's idea that religion is nothing more than an illusion, or even a mental illness, and the Marxist view that religion is "the sigh of the oppressed," providing only "the illusory happiness of the people," are two other influential reductionist explanations of religion.

There is a certain degree of reductionism in the social sciences, which often try to explain whole areas of social activity as mere subfields of their own field. As an example, Marxist economists often try to explain politics as subordinated to economy, and sociologists sometimes see economy and politics as mere sub-spheres of society.

Types of reductionism

Theoretical reductionism

Theoretical reduction is the process by which one theory absorbs another. For example, both Kepler's laws of the motion of the planets and Galileo’s theories of motion worked out for terrestrial objects are reducible to Newtonian theories of mechanics, because all the explanatory power of the former are contained within the latter. Furthermore, the reduction is considered to be beneficial because Newtonian mechanics is a more general theory—that is, it explains more events than Galileo's or Kepler's. Theoretical reduction, therefore, is the reduction of one explanation or theory to another—that is, it is the absorption of one of our ideas about a particular thing into another idea.

Methodological reductionism

Methodological reductionism is the position that the best scientific strategy is to attempt to reduce explanations to the smallest possible entities. Methodological reductionism would thus hold that the atomic explanation of a substance’s boiling point is preferable to the chemical explanation, and that an explanation based on even smaller particles (quarks and leptons, perhaps) would be even better.

Methodological reductionism, therefore, is the position that all scientific theories either can or should be reduced to a single super-theory through the process of theoretical reduction.

Ontological reductionism

Ontological reductionism is the belief that reality is composed of a minimum number of kinds of entities or substances. This claim is usually metaphysical, and is most commonly a form of monism, in effect claiming that all objects, properties and events are reducible to a single substance. (A dualist who is an ontological reductionist would believe that everything is reducible to two substances - as one possible example, a dualist might claim that reality is composed of "matter" and "spirit".)

Reductionism and science

Reductionist thinking and methods form the basis for many of the well-developed areas of modern science, including much of physics, chemistry and cell biology. Classical mechanics in particular is seen as a reductionist framework, and statistical mechanics can be viewed as a reconciliation of macroscopic thermodynamic laws with the reductionist approach of explaining macroscopic properties in terms of microscopic components.

In science, reductionism implies that certain fields of study are based on areas that study smaller spatial scales or organizational units. While it is commonly accepted that the foundations of chemistry are based in physics, and microbiology is rooted in chemistry, similar statements become controversial when one considers less rigorously defined intellectual pursuits. For example, claims that sociology is based on psychology, or that economics is based on sociology and psychology would be met with reservations. These claims are difficult to substantiate even though there are clear connections between these fields (for instance, most would agree that psychology can affect and inform economics.) The limit of reductionism's usefulness stems from emergent properties of complex systems, which are more common at certain levels of organization. For example, certain aspects of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology are rejected by some who claim that complex systems are inherently irreducible and that a holistic approach is needed to understand them.

Daniel Dennett defends scientific reductionism—which he says is really little more than materialism—by distinguishing between this and what he calls "Greedy reductionism": the idea that every explanation in every field of science should be reduced to particle physics or string theory. Greedy reductionism, he says, deserves some of the criticism heaped on reductionism in general because the lowest-level explanation of a phenomenon, even if it exists, is not always the best way to understand or explain it.

Some strong reductionists believe that the behavioral sciences should become "genuine" scientific disciplines based on genetic biology, and on the systematic study of culture (cf. Richard Dawkins's concept of memes). In his book ''The Blind Watchmaker'', Dawkins introduced the term "hierarchical reductionism" to describe the view that complex systems can be described with a hierarchy of organizations, each of which is only described in terms of objects one level down in the hierarchy. He provides the example of a computer, which under hierarchical reductionism is explained in terms of the operation of hard drives, processors, and memory, but not on the level of AND OR gates, or on the even lower level of electrons in a semiconductor medium.

Both Dennett and Steven Pinker argue that too many people who are opposed to science use the words "reductionism" and "reductionist" less to make coherent claims about science than to convey a general distaste for the endeavor, saying the opponents often use the words in a rather slippery way, to refer to whatever they dislike most about science. Dennett suggests that critics of reductionism may be searching for a way of salvaging some sense of a higher purpose to life, in the form of some kind of non-material / supernatural intervention. Dennett terms such aspirations "skyhooks," in contrast to the "cranes" that reductionism uses to build its understanding of the universe from solid ground.

Others argue that inappropriate use of reductionism limits our understanding of complex systems. In particular, ecologist Robert Ulanowicz says that science must develop techniques to study ways in which larger scales of organization influence smaller ones, and also ways in which feedback loops create structure at a given level, independently of details at a lower level of organization. He advocates (and uses) information theory as a framework to study propensities in natural systems. Ulanowicz attributes these criticisms of reductionism to the philosopher Karl Popper and biologist Robert Rosen.

Reductionism in mathematics

In mathematics, reductionism can be interpreted as the philosophy that all mathematics can (or ought to) be built off a common foundation, which is usually axiomatic set theory. Ernst Zermelo was one of the major advocates of such a view; he also developed much of axiomatic set theory. It has been argued that the generally accepted method of justifying mathematical axioms by their usefulness in common practice can potentially undermine Zermelo's reductionist program.

As an alternative to set theory, others have argued for category theory as a foundation for certain aspects of mathematics.

Reductionism in psychology

In Psychology there is a strong tendency to offer explanations in terms of Physiology or Neurology. While such explanations offer additional evidence for the theories they support, they are not fundamentally superior to the evidence provided by Empirical research and theoretical development within the science of psychology itself.

Ontological reductionism

Ontological reductionism is the claim that everything that exists is made from a small number of basic substances that behave in regular ways (''compare to monism''). Ontological reductionism denies the idea of ontological emergence, and claims that emergence is an epistemological phenomenon that only exists through analysis or description of a system, and does not exist on a fundamental level.

Ontological reductionism takes two different forms: Token ontological reductionism is the idea that every item that exists is a sum item. For perceivable items, it says that every perceivable item is a sum of items at a smaller level of complexity. Type ontological reductionism is the idea that every type of item is a sum (of typically less complex) type(s) of item(s). For perceivable types of item, it says that every perceivable type of item is a sum of types of items at a lower level of complexity. Token ontological reduction of biological things to chemical things is generally accepted. Type ontological reduction of biological things to chemical things is often rejected.

Michael Ruse has criticized ontological reductionism as an improper argument against vitalism.

Reductionism in linguistics

Linguistic reductionism is the idea that everything can be described in a language with a limited number of core concepts, and combinations of those concepts.

Limits of reductionism

A contrast to the reductionist approach is holism or emergentism. Holism is the idea that things can have properties, (emergent properties), as a whole that are not explainable from the sum of their parts. The principle of holism was concisely summarized by Aristotle in the Metaphysics: "The whole is more than the sum of its parts".

The term Greedy reductionism, coined by Daniel Dennett, is used to criticize inappropriate use of reductionism. Other authors use different language when describing the same thing.

In philosophy

The concept of downward causation poses an alternative to reductionism within philosophy. This view is developed and explored by Peter Bøgh Andersen, Claus Emmeche, Niels Ole Finnemann, and Peder Voetmann Christiansen, among others. These philosophers explore ways in which one can talk about phenomena at a larger-scale level of organization exerting causal influence on a smaller-scale level, and find that some, but not all proposed types of downward causation are compatible with science. In particular, they find that constraint is one way in which downward causation can operate. The notion of causality as constraint has also been explored as a way to shed light on scientific concepts such as self-organization, natural selection, adaptation, and control.

In science

Phenomena such as emergence and work within the field of complex systems theory pose limits to reductionism. Stuart Kauffman is one of the advocates of this viewpoint. Emergence is strongly related to nonlinearity. The limits of the application of reductionism become especially evident at levels of organization with higher amounts of complexity, including culture, neural networks, ecosystems, and other systems formed from assemblies of large numbers of interacting components. Symmetry breaking is an example of an emergent phenomenon. Nobel laureate P.W.Anderson used this idea in his famous paper in Science in 1972, 'More is different' to expose some of the limitations of reductionism. The limitation of reductionism was explained as follows. The sciences can be arranged roughly linearly in a hierarchy as particle physics, many body physics, chemistry, molecular biology, cellular biology, ..., physiology, psychology and social sciences. The elementary entities of one science obeys the laws of the science that precedes it in the above hierarchy. But, this does not imply that one science is just an applied version of the science that precedes it. Quoting from the article, "''At each stage, entirely new laws, concepts and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one. Psychology is not applied biology nor is biology applied chemistry''."

Disciplines such as cybernetics and systems theory strongly embrace a non-reductionist view of science, sometimes going as far as explaining phenomena at a given level of hierarchy in terms of phenomena at a higher level, in a sense, the opposite of a reductionist approach.

Free will and religion

Philosophers of the Enlightenment worked to insulate human free will from reductionism. Descartes separated the material world of mechanical necessity from the world of mental free will. German philosophers introduced the concept of the "noumenal" realm that is not governed by the deterministic laws of "phenomenal" nature, where every event is completely determined by chains of causality. The most influential formulation was by Immanuel Kant, who distinguished between the causal deterministic framework the mind imposes on the world—the phenomenal realm—and the world as it exists for itself, the noumenal realm, which included free will. To insulate theology from reductionism, 19th century post-Enlightenment German theologians moved in a new direction, led by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl. They took the Romantic approach of rooting religion in the inner world of the human spirit, so that it is a person's feeling or sensibility about spiritual matters that comprises religion.

Benefits of reduction

An ontological reduction reduces the number of ontological primitives that exist within our ontology. Philosophers welcome this, because every ontological primitive demands a special explanation for its existence. If we maintain that life is not a physical property, for example, then we must give a separate explanation of why some objects possess it and why others do not. This is more often than not a daunting task, and such explanations often have the flavor of ''ad hoc'' contrivances or ''deus ex machina''. Also, since every ontological primitive must be acknowledged as one of the fundamental principles of the natural world, we must also account for why this element in particular should be considered one of those underlying principles. (To return to an earlier example, it would be extremely difficult to explain why planets are so fundamental that special laws of motion should apply to them.) This is often extremely hard to do, especially in the face of our strong preference for simple explanations. Pursuing ontological reduction thus serves to unify and simplify our ontology, while guarding against needless multiplication of entities in the process.

At the same time, the requirements for satisfactorily showing that one thing is reducible to another are extremely steep. First and foremost, all features of the original property or object must be accounted for. For example, lightning would not be reducible to the electrical activity of air molecules if the reduction explained why lightning is deadly, but not why it always seeks the highest point to strike. Our preference for simple and unified explanations is a strong force for reductionism, but our demand that all relevant phenomena be accounted for is at least as strong a force against it.

Alternatives to reductionism

In recent years, the development of systems thinking has provided methods for tackling issues in a holistic rather than a reductionist way, and many scientists approach their work in a holistic paradigm. When the terms are used in a scientific context, holism and reductionism refer primarily to what sorts of models or theories offer valid explanations of the natural world; the scientific method of falsifying hypotheses, checking empirical data against theory, is largely unchanged, but the approach guides which theories are considered. The conflict between reductionism and holism in science is not universal—it usually centers on whether or not a holistic or reductionist approach is appropriate in the context of studying a specific system or phenomenon.

In many cases (such as the kinetic theory of gases), given a good understanding of the components of the system, one can predict all the important properties of the system as a whole. In other cases, trying to do this leads to a fallacy of composition. In those systems, emergent properties of the system are almost impossible to predict from knowledge of the parts of the system. Complexity theory studies such systems.

Alfred North Whitehead set his metaphysical thinking in opposition to reductionism. He refers to this as the 'fallacy of the misplaced concreteness'. His scheme set out to frame a rational, general understanding of things, that was derived from our reality.

The reductionist strategy or any method of simplification in scientific disciplines risks overlooking or negating awareness that already exists. Chaos theory, the concept of entropy in study of chemistry, and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in particle physics, all indicate the awareness and cognition of the world becomes more complex as the level of awareness of it increases.

Scientists who use reductionist methods often take an approach that relies on contradicting previous contributions in their own context to science in order to validate a new theory, when sometimes there is no need to disprove existing theories in order to provide new insight. Proving a theory to be invalid and proving a new assumption to be true must both take place on their own merits. Scientific theories that are half-valid and half-invalid can be entirely brushed aside with reductionism, whereas with a holistic paradigm such as additivism, one can add the half-valid parts to updated assumptions. A reductionist would be less likely to view currently invalid theories as valid contributions in the context in which they were observed, utilized and presented, whereas a complexity theorist would be more likely to.

Sven Erik Jorgensen, an ecologist, lays out both theoretical and practical arguments for a holistic approach in certain areas of science, especially ecology. He argues that many systems are so complex that it will not ever be possible to describe all their details. Drawing an analogy to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics, he argues that many interesting and relevant ecological phenomena cannot be replicated in laboratory conditions, and thus cannot be measured or observed without influencing and changing the system in some way. He also points to the importance of interconnectedness in biological systems. His viewpoint is that science can only progress by outlining what questions are unanswerable and by using models that do not attempt to explain everything in terms of smaller hierarchical levels of organization, but instead model them on the scale of the system itself, taking into account some (but not all) factors from levels both higher and lower in the hierarchy.

See also

Antireductionism

Aristotle

Eliminativism

Emergentism

Holism

Materialism

Multiple realizability was used as a source of arguments against reductionism.

Philosophy of Mind

Physicalism

Physical ontology

Scientism

Systems theory

Symmetry breaking

Theology

References

Further reading

Dawkins, Richard (1976), ''The Selfish Gene''. Oxford University Press; 2nd edition, December 1989.

Descartes (1637), ''Discourses'', Part V.

Dupre, John (1993), ''The Disorder of Things''. Harvard University Press.

Jones, Richard H. (2000), ''Reductionism: Analysis and the Fullness of Reality''. Bucknell University Press. (For the general reader.)

Laughlin, Robert (2005), ''A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down.'' Basic Books.

Nagel, Ernest (1961), ''The Structure of Science''. New York.

Ruse, Michael (1988), ''Philosophy of Biology''. Albany, NY.

Dennett, Daniel. (1995) ''Darwin's Dangerous Idea''. Simon & Schuster.

Fritjof Capra (1982), ''The Turning Point''.

Alexander Rosenberg (2006), ''Darwinian Reductionism or How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology''. University of Chicago Press.

Steven Pinker (2002), ''The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature''. Viking Penguin.

Stephen Weinberg (1992), ''Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist's Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature'', Pantheon Books.

Steven Weinberg (2002) describes what he terms the culture war among physicists in his review of ''A New Kind of Science''.

Eric Scerri The reduction of chemistry to physics has become a central aspect of the philosophy of chemistry. See several articles by this author.

Lopez, F., Il pensiero olistico di Ippocrate. Riduzionismo, antiriduzionismo, scienza della complessità nel trattato sull'Antica Medicina, vol. IIA, Ed. Pubblisfera, Cosenza Italy 2008.

External links

Ingo Brigandt and Alan Love, "Reductionism in Biology" in: ''The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy''.

John Dupré: The Disunity of Science-- an interview at the Galilean Library covering criticisms of reductionism.

Category:Philosophy of science Category:Physics Category:Metatheory Category:Metaphysical theories Category:Sociological theories Category:Analytic philosophy

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Stuart Alan Kauffman (28 September 1939) is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher concerning the origin of life on Earth. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as well as for applying models of Boolean networks to simplified genetic circuits.

Biography

Kauffman graduated from Dartmouth in 1960, was awarded the BA (Hons) by Oxford University in 1963, and completed a medical degree (M.D.) at the University of California, San Francisco in 1968. After completing his residency in Emergency Medicine, he moved into developmental genetics of the fruitfly, holding appointments first at the University of Chicago, then at the University of Pennsylvania from 1975 to 1995, where he rose to Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics. Kauffman held a MacArthur Fellowship, 1987–1992.

Kauffman rose to prominence through his association with the Santa Fe Institute (a non-profit research institute dedicated to the study of complex systems), where he was faculty in residence from 1986 to 1997, and through his work on models in various areas of biology. These included autocatalytic sets in origin of life research, gene regulatory networks in developmental biology, and fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology. Kauffman holds the founding broad biotechnology patents in combinatorial chemistry and applied molecular evolution.

In 1996, Kauffman started BiosGroup, a Santa Fe, New Mexico-based for-profit company that employed complex systems methodology to attempt to solve business problems. BiosGroup was acquired by NuTech Solutions in early 2003. NuTech was bought by Netezza in 2008.

From 2004 to 2009 Kauffman held a joint appointment at the University of Calgary in Biological Sciences and Physics and Astronomy. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. He is an iCORE (Informatics Research Circle of Excellence) chair and the director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics.

In January 2009 Kauffman became a Finland Distinguished Professor (FiDiPro) at Tampere University of Technology, Department of Signal Processing. The appointment is until the end of 2012. The subject of the FiDiPro research project is the development of delayed stochastic models of genetic regulatory networks based on gene expression data at the single molecule level.

In January 2010 Kauffman joined the University of Vermont faculty where he will continue his work with UVM's Complex Systems Center.

Work

Kauffman is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection.

Some fellow biologists and physicists working in Kauffman's area reserve judgment on Kauffman's claims about self-organization and evolution. A case in point is the introduction to the 2002 book "Self Organization in Biological Systems".

Publications

Select bibliography

1993, ''Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution'', Oxford University Press, Technical monograph. ISBN 0195079515

1995, ''At Home in the Universe：The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity''. Oxford University Press.

2000, ''Investigations''. Oxford University Press.

2008, ''Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion''. [Basic Books] - ISBN 0465003001

Selected articles

1969, "Metabolic stability and epigenesis in randomly constructed genetic nets," in: ''Journal of Theoretical Biology'', 22:437–467, 1969.

1991, "Antichaos and Adaptation," in: ''Scientific American'', August 1991.

2004, "Prolegomenon to a General Biology", in William A. Dembski, Michael Ruse, eds., ''Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA'', Cambridge University Press.

2004, "Autonomous Agents", in John D. Barrow, P.C.W. Davies, and C.L. Harper Jr., eds., ''Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology, and Complexity'', Cambridge University Press.

About Stuart Kauffman

MacKenzie, Dana (2002). "The Science of Surprise", ''Discover Magazine'', Vol. 23, No. 2, 59–63, February 2002.

Kauffman about Kauffman: (Video)

Goldstein, Jeffrey A. (2008). Book Review of "Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion", by Stuart Kauffman. In ''Emergence: Complexity & Organization'', 10(3), 117–130.

References

External links

An online chat with Stuart Kauffman on a complexity organization website.

Video presentation "The adjacent possible" by Kauffman on autonomous agents.

Biocomplexity and Informatics iCORE Chair.

Beyond reductionism: Reinventing The Sacred, paper by Kauffman on reductionism.

Video presentation "Reinventing The Sacred" Stuart Kauffman on his new book. Video talk for a Conference in Doha, Katar, produced, May 17.2008

SYNCD.org Stuart Kauffman about the need of a "transnational mythic structure"

Tech Nation discussion with Dr. Moira Gunn on his book "Reinventing the Sacred" (recorded June 6, 2008).

"God enough" by Steve Paulson Interview with Stuart Kauffman (2008).

Stuart Kauffman homepage at Tampere University of Technology

Kauffman's lecture videos at Tampere in April 2010

Category:1939 births Category:Biophysicists Category:Complex systems scientists Category:Dartmouth College alumni Category:MacArthur Fellows Category:Living people Category:Religious naturalists Category:Systems scientists Category:Theoretical biologists

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Anthony Stafford Beer (September 25, 1926 - August 23, 2002) was a British theorist, consultant and professor at the Manchester Business School. He is best known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics.

Biography

Beer was born in London. He started a degree in philosophy at University College London, but left in 1944 to join the army. He saw service in India and stayed there until 1947. In 1949, he was demobilized, having reached the rank of captain.

He joined United Steel and persuaded the management to found an operational research group, the Department of Operations Research and Cybernetics, which he headed. In 1961 he left United Steel to start an operational research consultancy in partnership with Roger Eddison called SIGMA (Science in General Management). Beer left SIGMA in 1966 to work for a SIGMA client, the International Publishing Corporation (IPC). He was appointed development director at IPC and pushed for the adoption of new computer technologies. Beer left IPC in 1970 to work as an independent consultant, focusing on his growing interest in social systems.

In 1970, Beer was approached by Salvador Allende's elected socialist government of Chile to develop a national real-time computerised system Cybersyn to run the entire Chilean economy. This project was never completed. When Allende was removed from power by General Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup, the Cybersyn project was abandoned. Beer continued to work in the Americas, consulting for the governments of Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela.

In the mid 1970s, Beer renounced material possessions and moved to mid-Wales where he lived in an almost austere style, developing strong interests in poetry and art. In the 1980s he established a second home on the west side of downtown Toronto and lived part of the year in both residences. Beer kept active with work in his field.

Beer was a visiting professor at almost 30 universities and received honorary doctorates from the University of Leeds, the University of St. Gallen, the University of Sunderland and the University of Valladolid. He was president of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics. And he received awards from the Royal Swedish Academy for Engineering Sciences in 1958, from the United Kingdom Systems Society, the Cybernetics Society, the American Society for Cybernetics, and the Operations Research Society of America.

He was married twice, in 1947 to Cynthia Hannaway and in 1968 to Sallie Steadman. His partner for the last twenty years of his life was Dr Allenna Leonard, a fellow cybernetician. Beer had five sons and three daughters, one of whom is Vanilla Beer, an artist and essayist. Stafford Beer died in Toronto on August 23, 2002 at the age of 75 years after a considerable period of ill-health.

Work

Stafford Beer worked in the fields of operational research, cybernetics and management science. He had become aware of operational research while being in the army, and he was quick to identify the advantages it could bring to business.

In the late 1950s, he published his first book about cybernetics and management, building on the ideas of Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and especially William Ross Ashby for a systems approach to the management of organisations.

In the 1970s, he also wrote a series of books (the last three focussing upon his own Viable System Model for organisation modelinkg):

In the 1990s, he published one of his last books about Team Syntegrity: a formal model, built on the polyhedra idea of systems for non-hierarchical problem solving.

Management cybernetics

According to Jackson (2000) "Beer was the first to apply cybernetics to management, defining cybernetics as the ''science of effective organization''". In the 1960s and early 1970s "Beer was a prolific writer and an influential practitioner" in management cybernetics. It was during that period that he developed the viable system model, to diagnose the faults in any existing organizational system. In that time Forrester invented systems dynamics, which "held out the promise that the behavior of whole systems could be represented and understood through modeling the dynamical feedback process going on within them".

Management cybernetics is the application of cybernetic laws to all types of organizations and institutions created by human beings, and to the interactions within them and between them. It is a theory based on natural laws. It addresses the issues that every individual who wants to influence an organization in any way must learn to resolve. This theory is not restricted to the actions of top managers. Every member of an organization and every person who, to a greater or lesser extent, communicates or interacts with it is involved in the considerations.

Cybersyn

During the administration of Salvador Allende in Chile, in the early 1970s, a visionary project about the use of information and communications in government was undertaken by Stafford Beer. The project was called Cybersyn, and contemplated the transmission of information in real-time to support the management of the country’s industrial economy. At its core was an Operations Room constantly receiving and displaying information and transmitting decisions.

A network of about 500 telex machines linking the country from north to south supported all this. A single computer center in Santiago controlled them, using principles of cybernetics. The project had the participation of a multidisciplinary group of national and international scientists. Their task was to build a system for distributed decision-making supported by relevant information. But their efforts were interrupted by the coup d'état of 1973.

Viable System Model

The Viable System Model (VSM) is a model of the organisational structure of any viable or autonomous system. A viable system is any system organised in such a way as to meet the demands of surviving in the changing environment. One of the prime features of systems that survive is that they are adaptable. The VSM expresses a model for a viable system, which is an abstracted cybernetic description that is applicable to any organisation that is a viable system and capable of autonomy.

Syntegrity

Syntegrity is a formal model presented by Beer in the 1990s and now is a registered trademark. It is a form of non-hierarchical problem solving that can be used in a small team of 10 to 42 people. It is a business consultation product that is licensed out to consulting firms as a basis model for solving problems in a team environment.

"Syntegrity", "Syntegration", "Team Syntegrity", and "Team Syntegration" are all registered trademarks. The term "Syntegrity" is a portmanteau of “synergistic tensegrity".

POSIWID

Stafford Beer coined and frequently used the term POSIWID (the purpose of a system is what it does) to refer to the commonly observed phenomenon that the de facto purpose of a system is often at odds with its official purpose. Beer coined the term POSIWID and used it many times in public addresses. Perhaps most forcefully in his address to the University of Valladolid, Spain in October 2001, he said "According to the cybernetician the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment or sheer ignorance of circumstances."

Literature

Stafford Beer wrote several books and articles:

1959, ''Cybernetics and Management'', English Universities Press

1966, ''Decision and Control'', Wiley, London

1972, ''Brain Of The Firm'', Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London, Herder and Herder, USA.Translated into German, Italian, Swedish and French.

1974, ''Designing Freedom'', CBC Learning Systems, Toronto, 1974; and John Wiley, London and New York, 1975. Translated into Spanish and Japanese.

1975, ''Platform for Change'', John Wiley, London and New York. Reprinted with corrections 1978.

1977, ''Transit''; Poems, CWRW Press, Wales. Limited Edition, Private Circulation.

1979, ''The Heart of Enterprise'', John Wiley, London and New York. Reprinted with corrections 1988.

1981, ''Brain of the Firm''; Second Edition (much extended), John Wiley, London and New York. Reprinted 1986, 1988. Translated into Russian.

1983, ''Transit''; Poems, Second edition (much extended). With audio cassettes: Transit – Selected Readings, and one Person Metagame; Mitchell Communications, Publisher, PO Box 2878, Charlottetown, PEI, Canada.

1985, ''Diagnosing the System for Organizations''; John Wiley, London and New York. Translated into Italian and Japanese. Reprinted 1988, 1990, 1991.

1986, ''Pebbles to Computer'': The Thread; (with Hans Blohm), Oxford University Press, Toronto.

1994, ''Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity''; John Wiley, Chichester.

;Audio

1990, Stafford Beer, "Forty Years of Cybernetics", Gordon Hyde Memorial Lecture at the Cybernetics Society in London January 1990, audio file: 1hr 27mins.

;About Stafford Beer

1994, Harnden, R and Leonard, A. (Eds.), ''How Many Grapes Went into the Wine: Stafford Beer on the Art and Science of Holisitic Management''; John Wiley, Chichester.

2003, Whittaker, David, ''Stafford Beer: A Personal Memoir''; (Includes an interview with Brian Eno) Wavestone Press, Charlbury

2006, Jonathan Rosenhead, "IFORS' Operational Research Hall of Fame Stafford Beer", in ''International Transactions in Operational Research'' Vol 13, nr.6, pp. 577–581.

2009, Whittaker, David, (Ed.) ''Think Before you Think: Social Complexity and Knowledge of Knowing''; (Selected writings of Stafford Beer with life chronology), Foreword by Brian Eno, Wavestone Press, Charlbury

References

External links

Stafford Beer papers held at Liverpool John Moores University

Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile

Commemorative web site about Stafford Beer

Stafford Beer Biography from Vanilla Beer

What is Cybernetics? Javier Livas - short introductory videos on YouTube

;Organizations

Cybernetics Society Memorial

The Metaphorum Group - Developing Stafford Beer's Legacy in Management Cybernetics

Systems & Cybernetics in Organisations (SCiO) - "focus on practice and members support activities." [accessed 3 July 2009

Introduction to the Viable Systems Model and use in Cooperatives

Web site of the cybersyn project

To commemorate Stafford Beer Web-site

Category:1926 births Category:2002 deaths Category:Alumni of University College London Category:Cyberneticists Category:Old Whitgiftians Category:Operations researchers Category:Systems scientists Category:Massey Lecturers Category:Academics of the University of Manchester

az:Entoni Staford Bir de:Stafford Beer es:Stafford Beer it:Anthony Stafford Beer nl:Anthony Stafford Beer ja:スタッフォード・ビーア pt:Anthony Stafford Beer ru:Бир, Энтони Стаффорд fr:Stafford Beer

name	The Edge
background	solo_singer
birth name	David Howell Evans
birth date	August 08, 1961
Birth place	Barking, Essex, England, United Kingdom
origin	County Dublin, Ireland
instrument	Guitar, vocals, keyboards, piano, bass guitar
genre	Rock, post-punk, alternative rock
occupation	Musician, songwriter, activist
years active	1976–present
label	Island, Mercury
associated acts	U2, Passengers
website
notable instruments	Gibson ExplorerFender StratocasterGibson Les PaulFender TelecasterGretsch Country GentlemanGretsch White FalconRickenbacker 330/12 }}

David Howell Evans (born 8 August 1961), more widely known by his stage name The Edge (or just Edge), is a musician best known as the guitarist, backing vocalist, and keyboardist of the Irish rock band U2. A member of the group since its inception, he has recorded 12 studio albums with the band and has released one solo record. As a guitarist, The Edge has crafted a minimalistic and textural style of playing. His use of a rhythmic delay effect yields a distinctive ambient, chiming sound that has become a signature of U2's music.

The Edge was born in England to a Welsh family, but was raised in Ireland after moving there as an infant. In 1976, at Mount Temple Comprehensive School, he formed U2 with his fellow students and his older brother Dik. Inspired by the ethos of punk rock and its basic arrangements, the group began to write its own material. They eventually became one of the most popular acts in popular music, with successful albums such as 1987's ''The Joshua Tree'' and 1991's ''Achtung Baby''. Over the years, The Edge has experimented with various guitar effects and introduced influences from several genres of music into his own style, including American roots music, industrial music, and alternative rock. With U2, The Edge has also played keyboards, co-produced their 1993 record ''Zooropa'', and occasionally contributed lyrics. The Edge met his second and current wife, Morleigh Steinberg, through her collaborations with the band.

As a member of U2 and as an individual, The Edge has campaigned for human rights and philanthropic causes. He co-founded Music Rising, a charity to support musicians affected by Hurricane Katrina. He has collaborated with U2 bandmate Bono on several projects, including songs for Roy Orbison and Tina Turner, and the soundtracks to the musical ''Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark'' and the Royal Shakespeare Company's London stage adaptation of ''A Clockwork Orange''. In 2011, ''Rolling Stone'' magazine placed him at number 38 on its list of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".

Personal life

David Howell Evans was born at the Barking Maternity Hospital, Essex, England to Welsh parents Garvin and Gwenda Evans. When he was one, his family moved to County Dublin, Ireland where he attended St Andrew's National School. He received piano and guitar lessons and often performed with his brother Dik Evans before they both answered an advertisement posted by Larry Mullen, Jr. at their school, Mount Temple Comprehensive School, seeking musicians to form a band. The band accepted both of them. This band went through several incarnations before emerging as U2 in March 1978 (Dik Evans left the band just before the name change). U2 began performing in various venues in Ireland and eventually began developing a following. Their debut album, ''Boy'', was released in 1980.

In 1981, leading up to the October tour, Evans came very close to leaving U2 for religious reasons, but he decided to stay. During this period, he became involved with a group called Shalom Tigers, in which bandmates Bono and Larry Mullen Jr. were also involved. Shortly after deciding to remain with the band, he wrote a piece of music that later became "Sunday Bloody Sunday". The Edge married his high school girlfriend Aislinn O'Sullivan on 12 July 1983. The couple had three daughters together: Hollie in 1984, Arran in 1985 and Blue Angel in 1989. The couple separated in 1990, but were unable to get officially divorced because of Irish laws regarding marriage annulment; divorce was legalised in 1995 and the couple were legally divorced in 1996.

In 1993, The Edge began dating Morleigh Steinberg, a professional dancer and choreographer employed by the band as a belly dancer during the Zoo TV Tour. They had a daughter, Sian (born 1997), and a son, Levi (born 25 October 1999), before marrying on 22 June 2002. He appeared in the 2009 music documentary film ''It Might Get Loud''. The Edge has been criticized for his efforts to build five luxury mansions on a 156 acre plot of land in Malibu, California. The California Coastal Commission voted 8-4 against the plans, with the project described by the commission's executive director, Peter Douglas, as "In 38 years...one of the three worst projects that I've seen in terms of environmental devastation...It's a contradiction in terms – you can't be serious about being an environmentalist and pick this location." The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy agreed to remain neutral on the issue following a $1 million donation from The Edge and a commitment from The Edge to designate 100 acres of the land as open space for public footpaths.

Music style

Guitar playing

As a guitar player, The Edge has a sound typified by a low-key playing style, a chiming, shimmering sound (thanks in part to the sound of VOX AC-30s) that he achieves with extensive use of delay effects and reverb. The feedback delay is often set to a dotted eighth note (3/16 of a measure), and the feedback gain is adjusted until a note played repeats two or three times.

On 1987's ''The Joshua Tree'', The Edge often contributes just a few simple lead lines given depth and richness by an ever-present delay. For example, the introduction to "Where the Streets Have No Name" is simply a repeated six-note arpeggio, broadened by a modulated delay effect. The Edge has said that he views musical notes as "expensive", in that he prefers to play as few notes as possible. He said in 1982 of his style,

"I like a nice ringing sound on guitar, and most of my chords I find two strings and make them ring the same note, so it's almost like a 12-string sound. So for E I might play a B, E, E and B and make it ring. It works very well with the Gibson Explorer. It's funny because the bass end of the Explorer was so awful that I used to stay away from the low strings, and a lot of the chords I played were very trebly, on the first four, or even three strings. I discovered that through using this one area of the fretboard I was developing a very stylized way of doing something that someone else would play in a normal way."

Many different influences have shaped The Edge's guitar technique. His first guitar was an old acoustic guitar that his mother bought him at a local flea market for only a few pounds; he was nine at the time. He and his brother Dik Evans both experimented with this instrument. He said in 1982 of this early experimentation, "I suppose the first link in the chain was a visit to the local jumble sale where I purchased a guitar for a pound. That was my first instrument. It was an acoustic guitar and me and my elder brother Dik both played it, plonking away, all very rudimentary stuff, open chords and all that." The Edge has stated that many of his guitar parts are based around guitar effects. This is especially true from the ''Achtung Baby'' era onwards, although much of the band's 1980s material made heavy use of echos.

Vocals

The Edge also supplies the backing vocals for U2. U2's 1983 live album and video release, ''Under a Blood Red Sky'' and ''Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky'' are good reference points for his singing (as are the live DVDs from the Elevation Tour, ''U2 Go Home: Live from Slane Castle'' and ''Elevation 2001: Live from Boston''). For example, he sings the chorus to "Sunday Bloody Sunday" (Bono harmonizes on the final 'Sunday'). U2 used this tradeoff technique later in "Bullet the Blue Sky" as well. His backing vocals are sometimes in the form of a repeated cry; examples of songs that use this approach include "Beautiful Day", "New Year's Day" and "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)". Another technique he uses in his backing vocals is the falsetto, in songs such as "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of", "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own", "A Man and a Woman", "The Wanderer", live versions of "The Fly", and "Window in the Skies".

The Edge sings the lead vocal on "Van Diemen's Land" and "Numb", the first half of the song "Seconds", dual vocals with Bono in "Discotheque", and the bridge in the song "Miracle Drug". He also sings the occasional lead vocal in live renditions of other songs (such as "Sunday Bloody Sunday" during the PopMart Tour and "Party Girl" during the Rotterdam Zoo TV show when it was Bono's birthday). He also plays a solo acoustic version of the song "Love is Blindness" that is featured in the documentary film ''From the Sky Down''.

Other instruments

He has played piano and keyboards on many of the band's songs, including "I Fall Down", "October", "So Cruel", "New Year's Day", "Running to Stand Still", "Miss Sarajevo", "The Hands that Built America", and "Original of the Species" and others. He plays the organ on "Please". In live versions of "New Year's Day", "The Unforgettable Fire", "Your Blue Room", and "Moment of Surrender", he plays both the piano and guitar parts alternately. In most live versions of "Original of the Species," piano is the only instrument played during the song. Although The Edge is the band's lead guitarist, he occasionally plays bass guitar, including the live performances of the song "40" where The Edge and bassist Adam Clayton switch instruments.

Solo recordings

In addition to his regular role within U2, The Edge has also recorded with such artists as Johnny Cash, B. B. King, Tina Turner, Ronnie Wood, Jay-Z, and Rihanna. The Edge connected with Brian Eno and Lanois collaborator Michael Brook (the creator of the infinite guitar, which he regularly uses), working with him on the score to the film ''Captive'' (1986). From this soundtrack the song "Heroine", the vocal of which was sung by a young Sinéad O'Connor was released as a single.

He also created the theme song for season one and two of ''The Batman''. He and fellow U2 member, Bono, wrote the lyrics to the theme of the 1995 James Bond film ''GoldenEye''. The Edge, along with fellow bandmate Bono, recently composed a musical adaptation of Spider-Man. On May 25, 2011, a single titled ''Rise Above 1: Reeve Carney Featuring Bono and The Edge'' was released digitally. The music video was released on July 28, 2011.

Musical equipment

The Edge plays electric guitar, acoustic guitar, keyboards, piano, bass guitar (on "40" and "Race Against Time") and lap steel guitar. Compared to many lead guitarists, The Edge is known for using many more guitars during a show. According to his guitar tech Dallas Schoo, a typical lead guitarist uses four or five different guitars in one night, whereas The Edge takes 45 on the road, and uses 17 to 19 in one 2.5-hour concert. He is estimated to have more than 200 guitars in the studio.

Philanthropy

In 2005, The Edge along with Bob Ezrin and Henry Juszkiewicz co-founded Music Rising, a charity that helped provide replacement instruments for those that were lost in Hurricane Katrina. The instruments were originally only replaced for professional musicians but they soon realized the community churches and schools needed instruments as well. The charity's slogan is "Rebuilding the Gulf Region note by note" and has so far helped over a hundred musicians who were affected by Hurricane Katrina. The Edge also serves on the board of the Angiogenesis Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to improving global health by advancing angiogenesis-based medicine, diets, and lifestyle.

See also

List of people on stamps of Ireland

Timeline of U2

References

;Footnotes

;Bibliography

External links

U2.com, official U2 site

Music Rising

The Edge – Album Credits

A Study of The Edge's Guitar Delay

The Edge: 'It's all about the vision'

Food Bank For New York City public service announcement

Comment on the mathematical analysis of The Edge's guitar sound

Category:Irish male singers Category:Irish rock guitarists Category:Irish people of Welsh descent Category:People from County Dublin Category:People from Dalkey Category:Lead guitarists Category:Slide guitarists Category:Ivor Novello Award winners Category:Golden Globe Award winning musicians Category:Backing vocalists Category:U2 members Category:1961 births Category:Living people Category:Pseudonymous musicians Category:Rock songwriters

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