From a Closed to an Open System

Abstract

IOLOGY, in its traditional as well as its more recent microbiological aspects, is a science which has a story to tell the economist and the investment analyst who care to listen to the reports from its exploratory voyages and to examine the set of instruments used to keep the voyage on course: they will attune the mind to listen for and expect the unexpected. The economic theorist and the investment analyst acquired the initial chest of tools used in the pursuit of their inquiries from the physical sciences developed during the 18th and 19th centuries. Here the linear sequence from material cause to material effect was one of the primary conditions of thought, method and accomplishment. For the economist as well as those investment analysts learning to use the tools prepared by the economic and ancillary sciences, it followed that the universe to be explored was a universe of material objects, an accumulation of material wealth, of brick and mortar and machines and other material manifestations of man's labor. In such a universe, the future resembles a mechanical event in a physical system. It can be predicted because the ingredients of the past comprise the ingredients of the future. It contains no element of surprise. There is nothing of the unexpected in this type of universe. A biological or evolutionary system introduces a radically new and different method of thought and approach into the closed system of physical and mechanical science. The economist getting acquainted with biology, genetics, biochemistry, microbiology, etc. begins to acquire a second set of tools besides those inherited from the age of physical science. He no longer sees the universe to be explored exclusively in terms of linear sequence of cause and effect, but as a complex that is open towards the future. If the future is no longer completely predetermined by the chain of events preceding it in time-as the former view implied-then some important inferences can be drawn. It will no longer suffice patiently to increase the inventory of data available, to make known more and more of the links in the chain of events and to be sure not to be in ignorance of any of the bits of knowledge accumulated with painstaking care. The sequence of events unrolling towards the future will always reveal something unexpected, something new, an element of surprise. Thomas Huxley, the eminent biologist and evolutionary theorist of the late 19th century, illustrated this significance of the unexpected when, with a side glance at the ethical prejudices of his contemporaries, he refused to believe that the eohippos of primeval times would find any measure of compensation for his sufferings in the fact that, some millions of years after him, one of his descendants was going to win the English Derby. A biological system that is, while bios, life, exists exhibits one of the essential traits that distinguish it from a mechanical or physical system: the homeostatic ability to maintain constant internal conditions while its external surroundings undergo continuous and constant change and while the biological system itself suffers the metamorphosis of birth, replication and growth, then of contraction and decay. In a mechanical system time is neutral. It produces surprises only to the extent that the observer is ignorant of some of its constituent elements. In a biological system, time is a constituent factor. Precise prediction is precluded by the very nature of the system. Here time is not neutral and not reversible. Here theory is hindsight, has no predictive power, and proceeds in steps whose patterns are discernible only by analogy. The biologist is therefore defined, like the historian, as a prophet turned backward toward the past. When he turns around toward the future, the unexpectable will at some juncture assert itself and the inscrutability of events will over-awe him, as it will the historian tracing the footprints of time in human affairs. Life is not an illogicality, as Gil-