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                               THE PHENOMENON OF SCIENCE

                       a cybernetic approach to human evolution

                                by Valentin F. Turchin

   This Web edition was produced by the [1]Principia Cybernetica Project for
   research purposes (see the [2]introductory notice). The complete HTML source and
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   Copyright ©: [5]Valentin Turchin. This book is copyrighted material. If you
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   The hard copy book was scanned and converted to HTML by [6]An Vranckx and
   [7]Francis Heylighen. The following information pertains to the original 1977
   book edition:
     ____________________________________________________________________________

   Translated by Brand Frentz

   New York * Columbia University Press * 1977
   _________________________________________________________________________________

   Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

   Turchin, Valentin Fedorovich.
   The phenomenon of science.
   Includes bibliographical references and index.
   1. Science--Philosophy. 2 Evolution 3. Cosmology. 4. Cybernetics. I. Title.

   Q175.T7913 501 77-4330
   ISBN 0-231-03983-2

   New York * Columbia University Press * Guildford, Surrey
   Copyright (c) 1977 by Columbia University Press All Rights Reserved
   Printed in the United States of America
   _________________________________________________________________________________

                                         CONTENTS

     * [8]Foreword[9], by Loren Graham
     * [10]Preface

     [11]Chapter One. the Initial Stages of Evolution
     * [12]The Basic Law of Evolution
     * [13]The Chemical Era
     * [14]Cybernetics
     * [15]Discrete and Continuous Systems
     * [16]The Reliability of Discrete Systems
     * [17]Information
     * [18]The Neuron
     * [19]The Nerve Net
     * [20]The Simple Reflex (Irritability)
     * [21]The Complex Reflex

     [22]Chapter Two. Hierarchical Structures
     * [23]The Concept of the Concept
     * [24]Discriminators and Classifiers
     * [25]Hierarchies of Concepts
     * [26]How the Hierarchy Emerges
     * [27]Some Comments on Real Hierarchies
     * [28]The World through the Eyes of a Frog
     * [29]Fragments of a System of Concepts
     * [30]The Goal and Regulation
     * [31]How Regulation Emerges
     * [32]Representations
     * [33]Memory
     * [34]The Hierarchy of Goals and Plans
     * [35]Structural and Functional Diagrams
     * [36]The Transition to Phenomenological Descriptions
     * [37]Definition of the Complex Reflex

     [38]Chapter Three. On the Path Toward the Human Being
     * [39]The Metasystem Transition
     * [40]Control of the Reflex
     * [41]The Reflex as a Functional Concept
     * [42]Why Associations of Representations are Needed
     * [43]Evocation by Complement
     * [44]Spots and Lines
     * [45]The Conditioned Reflex and Learning
     * [46]Modeling
     * [47]Cognition of the World

     [48]Chapter Four. the Human Being
     * [49]Control of Associating
     * [50]Play
     * [51]Making Tools
     * [52]Imagination, Planning, Overcoming Instinct
     * [53]The Internal Teacher
     * [54]The Funny and the Beautiful
     * [55]Language
     * [56]Creation of Language
     * [57]Language As a Means of Modeling
     * [58]Self-Knowledge
     * [59]A Continuation of the Brain
     * [60]Social Integration
     * [61]The Super-Being

     [62]Chapter Five. From Step to Step
     * [63]Material and Spiritual Culture
     * [64]The Stairway Effect
     * [65]The Scale of the Metasystem Transition
     * [66]Tools for Producing Tools
     * [67]The Lower Paleolithic
     * [68]The Upper Paleolithic
     * [69]The Neolithic Revolution
     * [70]The Age of Metal
     * [71]The Industrial Revolutions
     * [72]The Quantum of Development
     * [73]The Evolution of Thought

     [74]Chapter Six. Logical Analysis of Language
     * [75]About Concepts Again
     * [76]Attributes and Relations
     * [77]Aristotelian Logic
     * [78]Hegel's Dialectic
     * [79]Mathematical Logic
     * [80]Objects and Statements
     * [81]Logical Connectives
     * [82]Predicates
     * [83]Quantifiers
     * [84]The Connective "Such That"
     * [85]The Physical Object and the Logical Object
     * [86]Functions
     * [87]Syntax and Semantics
     * [88]Logical Analysis of Language

     [89]Chapter Seven. Language and Thinking
     * [90]What Do We Know About Thinking?
     * [91]Linguistic Activity
     * [92]The Brain as a "Black Box"
     * [93]Affirmation and Negation
     * [94]The Phenomenological Definition of Semantics
     * [95]The Logical Concept
     * [96]The Structural Approach
     * [97]Two Systems
     * [98]Concept "Pilings"
     * [99]The Sapir-Whorf Conception
     * [100]Substance
     * [101]The Objectivization of Time
     * [102]Linguistic Relativity
     * [103]The Metasystem Transition in Language
     * [104]The Concept-Construct
     * [105]The Thinking of Humans and Animals

     [106]Chapter Eight. Primitive Thinking
     * [107]The System Aspect of Culture
     * [108]The Savage State and Civilization
     * [109]The Metasystem Transition in Linguistic Activity
     * [110]The Magic of Words
     * [111]Spirits and the Like
     * [112]The Trash Heap of Representations
     * [113]Belief and Knowledge
     * [114]The Conservatism of Precritical Thinking
     * [115]The Emergence of Civilization

     [116]Chapter Nine. Mathematics Before the Greeks
     * [117]Nature's Mistake
     * [118]Counting and Measurement
     * [119]Number Notation
     * [120]The Place-Value System
     * [121]Applied Arithmetic
     * [122]The Ancients' Knowledge of Geometry
     * [123]A Bird's Eye View of Arithmetic
     * [124]Reverse Movement in a Model
     * [125]Solving Equations
     * [126]The Formula

     [127]Chapter Ten. From Thales to Euclid
     * [128]Proof
     * [129]The Classical Period
     * [130]Plato's Philosophy
     * [131]What is Mathematics?
     * [132]Precision in Comparing Quantities
     * [133]The Reliability of Mathematical Assertions
     * [134]in Search of Axioms
     * [135]Concerning the Axioms of Arithmetic and Logic
     * [136]Platonism in Retrospect

     [137]Chapter Eleven. From Euclid To Descartes
     * [138]Number and Quantity
     * [139]Geometric Algebra
     * [140]Archimedes and Apollonius
     * [141]The Decline of Greek Mathematics
     * [142]Arithmetic Algebra
     * [143]Italy, Sixteenth Century
     * [144]Letter Symbolism
     * [145]What Did Descartes Do?
     * [146]The Relation As An Object
     * [147]Descartes and Fermat
     * [148]The Path to Discovery

     [149]Chapter Twelve. From Descartes to Bourbaki
     * [150]Formalized Language
     * [151]The Language Machine
     * [152]Four Types of Linguistic Activity
     * [153]Science and Philosophy
     * [154]Formalization and the Metasystem Transition
     * [155]The Leitmotif of the New Mathematics
     * [156]"Nonexistent" Objects
     * [157]The Hierarchy of theories
     * [158]The Axiomatic Method
     * [159]Metamathematics
     * [160]The Formalization of Set theory
     * [161]Bourbaki's Treatise

     [162]Chapter Thirteen. Science and Metascience
     * [163]Experimental Physics
     * [164]The Scientific Method
     * [165]The Role of General Principles
     * [166]Criteria for the Selection of theories
     * [167]The Physics of the Microworld
     * [168]The Uncertainty Relation
     * [169]Graphic and Symbolic Models
     * [170]The Collapse of Determinism
     * [171]"Crazy" theories and Metascience

     [172]Chapter Fourteen. the Phenomenon of Science
     * [173]The Highest Level of the Hierarchy
     * [174]Science and Production
     * [175]The Growth of Science
     * [176]The Formalization of Scientific Language
     * [177]The Human Being and the Machine
     * [178]Scientific Control of Society
     * [179]Science and Morality
     * [180]The Problem of the Supreme Good
     * [181]Spiritual Values
     * [182]The Human Being in the Universe
     * [183]The Divergence of Trajectories
     * [184]Ethics and Evolution
     * [185]The Will to Immortality
     * [186]Integration and Freedom
     * [187]Questions, Questions . . .
   _________________________________________________________________________________

   Foreword VALENTIN TURCHIN presents in The Phenomenon of Science an evolutionary
   scheme of the universe--one that begins on the level of individual atoms and
   molecules, continues through the origin of life and the development of plants and
   animals, reaches the level of man and self-consciousness, and develops further in
   the intellectual creations of man, particularly in scientific knowledge. He does
   not see this development as a purposeful or preordained one, since he accepts
   entirely the Darwinian law of trial and error. Selection occurs within a set of
   random variations, and survival of forms is a happenstance of the relationship
   between particular forms and particular environments. Thus, there are no goals in
   evolution. Nonetheless, there are discernible patterns and, indeed, there is a
   ''law of evolution" by which one can explain the emergence of forms capable of
   activities which are truly novel. This law is one of the formation of higher and
   higher levels of cybernetic control. The nodal points of evolution for Turchin
   are the moments when the most recent and highest controlling subsystem of a large
   system is integrated into a metasystem and brought under a yet higher form of
   control. Examples of such transitions are the origin of life, the emergence of
   individual selfconsciousness, the appearance of language, and the development of
   the scientific method.

   Many authors in the last century have attempted to sketch schemes of cosmic
   evolution, and Turchin's version will evoke memories in the minds of his readers.
   The names of Spencer, Haeckel, Huxley, Engels, Morgan, Bergson, Teilhard de
   Chardin, Vernadsky, Bogdanov, Oparin, Wiener and many others serve as labels for
   concepts similar to some of those discussed by Turchin. Furthermore, it is clear
   that Turchin knows many of these authors, borrows from some of them, and cites
   them for their achievements. It is probably not an accident that the title of
   Turchin's book, ''The Phenomenon of Science,'' closely parallels the title of
   Teilhard's, ''The Phenomenon of Man.'' Yet it is equally clear that Turchin does
   not agree entirely with any of these authors, and his debts to them are
   fragmentary and selective. Many of them assigned a place either to vitalistic or
   to theological elements in their evolutionary schemes, both of which Turchin
   rejects. Others relied heavily on mechanistic, reductionist principles which left
   no room for the qualitatively new levels of biological and social orders that are
   so important to Turchin. And all of them--with the possible exception of Wiener,
   who left no comprehensive analysis of evolution--wrote at a time when it was
   impossible to incorporate information theory into their accounts.

   The two aspects of Turchin's scheme of cosmic evolution which distinguish it from
   its well-known predecessors are its heavy reliance on cybernetics and its
   inclusion of the development of scientific thought in evolutionary development
   that begins with the inorganic world. The first aspect is one which is intimately
   tied to Turchin's own field of specialization, since for many years he was a
   leader in the theory and design of Soviet computer systems and is the author of a
   system of computer language. Turchin believes that he gained insights from this
   experience that lead to a much more rigorous discussion of evolution than those
   of his predecessors. The second aspect of Turchin's account--the treatment of
   scientific concepts as ''objects'' governed by the same evolutionary regularities
   as chemical and biological entities--is likely to raise objections among some
   readers. Although this approach is also not entirely original--one thinks of some
   of the writings of Stephen Toulmin, for example--I know of no other author who
   has attempted to integrate science so thoroughly into a scheme of the evolution
   of physical and biological nature. Taking a thoroughly cybernetic view, Turchin
   maintains that it is not the ''substance'' of the entities being described that
   matters, but their principles of organization.

   For the person seeking to analyze the essential characteristics of Turchin's
   system of explanation, two of his terms will attract attention:
   ''representation'' and ''metasystem transition.'' Without a clear understanding
   of what he means by these terms, one cannot comprehend the overall developmental
   picture he presents. A central issue for critics will be whether a clear
   understanding of these terms can be gained from the material presented here.

   One of the most difficult tasks for Mr. Frentz, the translator, was connected
   with one of these central terms. This problem of finding an English word for the
   Russian term predstavlenie was eventually resolved by using the term
   ''representation.'' In my opinion, the difficulty for the translator was not
   simply a linguistic one, but involved a fundamental, unresolved philosophical
   issue. The term predstavlenie is used by Turchin to mean ''an image or a
   representation of a part of reality.'' It plays a crucial role in describing the
   situations in which an organism compares a given circumstance with one that is
   optimal from the standpoint of its survival. Thus, Turchin, after introducing
   this term, speaks of a hypothetical animal that ''loves a temperature of 16
   degrees Centigrade'' and has a representation of this wonderful situation in the
   form of the frequency of impulses of neurons. The animal, therefore, attempts to
   bring the given circumstances closer and closer into correspondence with its
   neuronal representation by moving about in water of different temperatures.

   This same term predstavlenie is also used to describe human behavior where the
   term ''mental image'' would seem to be a more felicitous translation. If we look
   in a good Russian-English dictionary, we shall find predstavlenie defined as
   ''presentation, idea, notion, representation.'' At first Dr. Turchin, who knows
   English well and was consulted by the translator, preferred the translation
   "notion". Yet it seemed rather odd, even vaguely anthropomorphic, to attribute a
   ''notion'' to a primitive organism, an amoeba, or even a fish. On the other hand,
   the term ''representation'' seemed too rudimentary for human behavior where
   ''idea'' or ''mental image" was clearly preferable. This difficulty arose from
   the effort to carry a constant term through evolutionary stages in which Turchin
   sees the emergence of qualitatively new properties. The problem is, therefore,
   only secondarily one of language. The basic issue is the familiar one of
   reductionism and nonreductionism in descriptions of biological and psychological
   phenomena. Since the Russian language happens to possess a term that fits these
   different stages better than English, we might do better to retain the Russian
   predstavlenie. In this text for a wide circle of English readers, however, the
   translator chose the word ''representation,'' probably the best that can be done.

   The difficulties of understanding the term ''metasystem transition'' arise from
   its inclusion of a particular interpretation of logical attributes and relations.
   Turchin believes that it is impossible to describe the process by which a
   particular system develops into a metasystem in the terms of classical logic.
   Classical logic, he says, describes only attributes, not relations. For an
   adequate description of relations, one must rely on the Hegelian dialectic, which
   permits one to see that the whole of a metasystem is greater than the sum of its
   subsystems. The Hegelian concept of quantitative change leading to qualitative
   change is thus not only explicitly contained within Turchin's scheme, but plays
   an essential role in it. The behavior of human society is qualitatively different
   from the behavior of individual humans. And social integration, through the ''law
   of branching growth of the penultimate level,'' may lead eventually to a concept
   of ''The Super-Being.''

   These concepts show some affinities to Marxist dialectical materialism, in which
   a similar differentiation of qualitatively distinct evolutionary levels has long
   been a characteristic feature. The British scientist J. D. Bernal once went so
   far as to claim that this concept of dialectical levels of natural laws was
   uniquely Marxist, when he wrote about ''the truth of different laws for different
   levels, an essentially Marxist idea.'' However, many non-Marxists have also
   advanced such a view of irreducible levels of laws; one should therefore be
   careful about terming a system of thought Marxist simply because it possesses
   this feature. Most Marxists would reject, at a minimum, Turchin's discussion of
   the concept of the Super-Being (although even in early Soviet Marxism
   ''God-building'' had a subrosa tradition). In Turchin's case we are probably
   justified in linking the inclusion of Hegelian concepts in his interpretation of
   nature to the education in philosophy he received in the Soviet Union. Soviet
   Marxism was probably one of several sources of Turchin's philosophic views;
   others are cybernetics and the thought of such earlier writers on cosmic
   evolution as Chardin and Vernadsky.

   In view of the links one can see between the ideas of Turchin and Marxism, it is
   particularly interesting to notice that Turchin is now in political difficulty in
   the Soviet Union. Before I give some of the details of his political biography,
   however, I shall note that in this essentially nonpolitical manuscript Turchin
   gives a few hints of possible social implications of his interpretation. He
   remarks that the cybernetic view he is presenting places great emphasis on
   ''control'' and that it draws an analogy between society and a multicellular
   organism. He then observes, ''This point of view conceals in itself a great
   danger that in vulgarized form it can easily lead to the conception of a
   fascist-type totalitarian state.'' This possibility of a totalitarian state, of
   whatever type, is clearly repugnant to Turchin, and his personal experience is a
   witness that he is willing to risk his own security in order to struggle against
   such a state. As for his interpretation of social evolution, he contends that
   ''the possibility that a theory can be vulgarized is in no way an argument
   against its truth.'' In the last sections of his book he presents suggestions for
   avoiding such vulgarizations while still working for greater social integration.

   Turchin is wrestling in this last part of his interpretation with a problem that
   has recently plagued many thinkers in Western Europe and America as well: Can one
   combine a scientific explanation of man and society with a commitment to
   individual freedom and social justice? Turchin is convinced that such combination
   of goals is possible; indeed, he sees this alliance as imperative, since he
   believes there is no conceptual alternative to the scientific worldview and no
   ethical alternative to the maintenance of individual freedom. It is the
   steadfastness of his support of science that will seem surprising to some of his
   readers in the West, where science is often seen as only a partial worldview, one
   to be supplemented with religious or nonscientific ethical or esthetic
   principles. Turchin, however, believes that humans can be explained within an
   entirely naturalistic framework. His belief that ethical and altruistic modes of
   behavior can emerge from an evolutionary scheme is, therefore, one that brings
   him in contact with recent writers in the West on sociobiology, physical
   anthropology, and evolutionary behavior. His emphases on information theory, on
   irreducible levels, and on the dangers of vulgarizations of scientific
   explanations of human behavior while nonetheless remaining loyal to science may
   make contributions to these already interesting discussions.

   ________________

   Valentin Fedorovich Turchin, born in 1931, holds a doctor's degree in the
   physical and mathematical sciences. He worked in the Soviet science center in
   Obninsk, near Moscow, in the Physics and Energetics Institute and then later
   became a senior scientific researcher in the Institute of Applied Mathematics of
   the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In this institute he specialized in
   information theory and the computer sciences. While working in these fields he
   developed a new computer language that was widely applied in the USSR, the
   ''Refal'' system. After 1973 he was the director of a laboratory in the Central
   Scientific-Research Institute for the Design of Automated Construction Systems.
   During his years of professional employment Dr. Turchin published over 65 works
   in his field. In sum, in the 1960s and early 1970s, Valentin Turchin was
   considered one of the leading computer specialists in the Soviet Union.

   Dr. Turchin's political difficulties began in 1968, when he was one of hundreds
   of scientists and other liberal intellectuals who signed letters protesting the
   crackdown on dissidents in the Soviet Union preceding and accompanying the
   Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the same year he wrote an article
   entitled "The Inertia of Fear'' which circulated widely in samizdat, the system
   of underground transmission of manuscripts in the Soviet Union. Later the same
   article was expanded into a book-length manuscript in which Dr. Turchin
   criticized the vestiges of Stalinism in Soviet society and called for democratic
   reform.

   In September 1973 Dr. Turchin was one of the few people in the Soviet Union who
   came to the defense of the prominent Soviet physicist Andrei D. Sakharov when the
   dissident scientist was attacked in the Soviet press. As a result of his defense
   of Sakharov, Turchin was denounced in his institute and demoted from chief of
   laboratory to senior research associate. The computer scientist continued his
   defense of human rights, and in July 1974, he was dismissed from the institute.
   In the ensuing months Dr. Turchin found that he had been blacklisted at other
   places of employment.

   In the last few years Professor Turchin has been chairman of the Moscow chapter
   of Amnesty International, an organization that has worked for human rights
   throughout the world. When other Soviet scholars were persecuted, including
   Andrei Tverdokhlebov and Sergei Kovalev, Dr. Turchin helped publicize their
   plight. During this period, his wife, a mathematician, has financially supported
   her husband and their two sons.

   In 1974 and 1975 Dr. Turchin received invitations to teach at several American
   universities, but the Soviet government refused to grant him an exit visa.
   Several writers in the West speculated that he would soon be arrested and tried,
   but so far he has been able to continue his activity, working within necessary
   limits. His apartment has been searched by the police and he has been
   interrogated.

   Dr. Turchin wrote The Phenomenon of Science before these personal difficulties
   began, and he did not intend it to be a political statement. Indeed, the
   manuscript was accepted for publication by a leading Soviet publishing house, and
   preliminary Soviet reviewers praised its quality. Publication of the book was
   stopped only after Dr. Turchin was criticized on other grounds. Therefore, that
   the initial publication of The Phenomenon of Science is outside the Soviet Union,
   should not be seen as a result of its content, but of the nonscientific
   activities of its author after it was written.

   LOREN R. GRAHAM

   Columbia University

   June 1977
   _________________________________________________________________________________

Preface

   WHAT IS scientific knowledge of reality? To answer this question from a
   scientific point of view means to look at the human race from outside, from outer
   space so to speak. Then human beings will appear as certain combinations of
   matter which perform certain actions, in particular producing some kind of words
   and writing some kind of symbols. How do these actions arise in the process of
   life's evolution? Can their appearance be explained on the basis of some general
   principles related to the evolutionary process? What is scientific activity in
   light of these general principles? These are the questions we shall attempt to
   answer in this book.

   Principles so general that they are applicable both to the evolution of science
   and to biological evolution require equally general concepts for their
   expression. Such concepts are offered by cybernetics, the science of
   relationships, control, and organization in all types of objects. Cybernetic
   concepts describe physicochemical, biological, and social phenomena with equal
   success. It is in fact the development of cybernetics, and particularly its
   successes in describing and modeling purposeful behavior and in pattern
   recognition, which has made the writing of this book possible. Therefore it would
   be more precise to define our subject as the cybernetic approach to science as an
   object of study.

   The intellectual pivot of the book is the concept of the metasystem
   transition--the transition from a cybernetic system to a metasystem, which
   includes a set of systems of the initial type organized and controlled in a
   definite manner. I first made this concept the basis of an analysis of the
   development of sign systems used by science. Then, however, it turned out that
   investigating the entire process of life's evolution on earth from this point of
   view permits the construction of a coherent picture governed by uniform laws.
   Actually it would be better to say a moving picture, one which begins with the
   first living cells and ends with present-day scientific theories and the system
   of industrial production. This moving picture shows, in particular, the place of
   the phenomenon of science among the other phenomena of the world and reveals the
   significance of science in the overall picture of the evolution of the universe.
   That is how the plan of this book arose. How convincingly this picture has been
   drawn I propose to leave to the reader's judgment.

   In accordance with the plan of the book, many very diverse facts and conceptions
   are presented. Some of the facts are commonly known; I try to limit my discussion
   of them, fitting them into the system and relating them to my basic idea. Other
   facts are less wellknown, and in such cases I dwell on them in more detail. The
   same is true for the conceptions; some are commonly recognized while others are
   less well known and, possibly, debatable. The varied nature of the material
   creates a situation where different parts of the book require different efforts
   from the reader. Some parts are descriptive and easy to read, in other places it
   is necessary to go deeply into quite specialized matters. Because the book is
   intended for a broad range of readers and does not assume knowledge beyond the
   secondary school level, I provide the necessary theoretical information in all
   such cases. These pages will require a certain effort of the untrained reader.

   The book gives an important place to the problems of the theory of knowledge and
   logic. They are, of course, treated from a cybernetic point of view. Cybernetics
   is now waging an attack on traditional philosophical epistemology, offering a new
   natural-science interpretation of some of its concepts and rejecting others as
   untenable. Some philosophers oppose the rise of cybernetics and consider it an
   infringement on their territory. They accuse cyberneticists of making the truth
   ''crude'' and ''simplifying" it; they claim cyberneticists ignore the
   ''fundamental difference'' between different forms of the movement of matter (and
   this is despite the thesis of the world's unity!). But the philosopher to whom
   the possessive attitude toward various fields of knowledge is foreign should
   welcome the attacks of the cyberneticists. The development of physics and
   astronomy once destroyed natural philosophy, sparing philosophers of the need to
   talk approximately about a subject which scientists could discuss exactly. It
   appears that the development of cybernetics will do the same thing with
   philosophical epistemology or, to be more cautious, with a significant part of
   it. This should be nothing but gratifying. Philosophers will always have enough
   concerns of their own; science rids them of some, but gives them others.

   Because the book is devoted to science in toto as a definite method of
   interaction between human society and its environment, it contains practically no
   discussion of concrete natural-science disciplines. The presentation remains
   entirely at the level of the concepts of cybernetics, logic, and mathematics,
   which are equally significant for all modern science. The only exception is for
   some notions of modern physics which are fundamentally important for the theory
   of sign systems. A concrete analysis of science's interaction with production and
   social life was also outside the scope of the problem. This is a distinct matter
   to which a vast literature has been devoted; in this book I remain at the level
   of general cybernetic concepts.

   It is dangerous to attempt to combine a large amount of material from different
   fields of knowledge into a single, whole picture; details may become distorted,
   for a person cannot be a specialist in everything. Because this book attempts
   precisely to create such a picture, it is very likely that specialists in the
   fields of science touched on here will find omissions and inaccuracies; such is
   the price which must be paid for a wide scope. But such pictures are essential.
   It only remains for me to hope that this book contains nothing more than errors
   in detail which can be eliminated without detriment to the overall picture.

   V. F. TURCHIN
     ____________________________________________________________________________

References

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   3. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/POS/POS.zip
   4. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/POS/TurPOS.pdf
   5. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/turchin.html
   6. mailto:avranckx@vub.ac.be
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