WHAT IS NEW 1/7 



system in which complexity is outstanding and too important to be 

 ignored. Such systems are, as we well know, only too common in 

 the biological world ! 



In the simpler systems, the methods of cybernetics sometimes 

 show no obvious advantage over those that have long been known. 

 It is chiefly when the systems become complex that the new methods 

 reveal their power. 



Science stands today on something of a divide. For two centuries 

 it has been exploring systems that are either intrinsically simple 

 or that are capable of being analysed into simple components. The 

 fact that such a dogma as "vary the factors one at a time" could be 

 accepted for a century, shows that scientists were largely concerned 

 in investigating such systems as allowed this method; for this method 

 is often fundamentally impossible in the complex systems. Not 

 until Sir Ronald Fisher's work in the '20s, with experiments con- 

 ducted on agricukural soils, did it become clearly recognised that 

 there are complex systems that just do not allow the varying of only 

 one factor at a time — they are so dynamic and interconnected that 

 the alteration of one factor immediately acts as cause to evoke 

 alterations in others, perhaps in a great many others. Until recently, 

 science tended to evade the study of such systems, focusing its 

 attention on those that were simple and, especially, reducible (8.4/ 14). 



In the study of some systems, however, the complexity could not 

 be wholly evaded. The cerebral cortex of the free-living organism, 

 the ant-hill as a functioning society, and the human economic system 

 were outstanding both in their practical importance and in their 

 intractability by the older methods. So today we see psychoses 

 untreated, societies dechning, and economic systems fahering, the 

 scientist being able to do little more than to appreciate the full 

 complexity of the subject he is studying. But science today is also 

 taking the first steps towards studying "complexity" as a subject 

 in its own right. 



Prominent among the methods for dealing with complexity is 

 cybernetics. It rejects the vaguely intuitive ideas that we pick up 

 from handling such simple machines as the alarm clock and the 

 bicycle, and sets to work to build up a rigorous discipline of the 

 subject. For a time (as the first few chapters of this book will show) 

 it seems rather to deal whh truisms and platitudes, but this is merely 

 because the foundations are built to be broad and strong. They 

 are built so that cybernetics can be developed vigorously, without 

 the primary vagueness that has infected most past attempts to 

 grapple with, in particular, the complexities of the brain in action. 



Cybernetics offers the hope of providing effective methods for the 



5 



