Talk:Biological organisation

NOTE: I was unable to figure out how to cite properly so please wait until I fix it or correct it yourself. I used this site: http://www.usoe.k12.ut.us/curr/Science/sciber00/7th/cells/sciber/levelorg.htm

Thanks for fixing the Ref.

—Preceding undated comment added 20:38, 14 December 2011 (UTC).

Merge/redirect

I think Levels of Organization (anatomy) should be merged with this article, or simply deleted and redirected here.OakRunner (talk) 23:03, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

But "levels of organization of anatomy" is a subset of "Biological levels of organisation"... And perhaps an initial merge is difficult, need work, because Anatomy is a reductionistic discipline. --Krauss (talk) 19:25, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

Reductionism is a mode of proof

Reductionism does not establish a hierarchy of life, it establishes a hierarchy of investigation or explanation; reductionism is an approach to reconcile the sciences by reducing biological facts to chemical and chemical to physical. Speaking of a "hierarchy" implies an ordering. Perhaps an ordering could be argued for -- so list the people who argue for it. I disagree with the premise of the article that biological organization, reductionism in biology and the 'hierarchy of life' are the same thing. This article needs serious editing. Mrdthree (talk) 21:54, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Change article

(I agree and suggest modification) --Krauss (talk) 19:25, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

Simon's hierarchical principle, as Odum remembered, explains the hierarchy of life, see holon concept or directly the base idea at

Simon, H. A. (1969). The architecture of complexity. In The Sciences of the Artificial (pp. 192-229). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Simon1 emphasized above all that hierarchy was something profoundly natural.

He viewed hierarchy as a general principle of complex structures -- and not just of particular complex structures but of complexity in general. Hierarchy, he argued, emerges almost inevitably through a wide variety of evolutionary processes, for the simple reason that hierarchical structures are stable.

To motivate this deep idea, he offered (1969: 90-92) his most important example of hierarchy, a "parable" about imaginary watchmakers.

Parable of the Watchmakers

There once were two watchmakers, named Hora and Tempus, who made very fine watches. The phones in their workshops rang frequently; new customers were constantly calling them. However, Hora prospered while Tempus became poorer and poorer. In the end, Tempus lost his shop. What was the reason behind this? The watches consisted of about 1000 parts each. The watches that Tempus made were designed such that, when he had to put down a partly assembled watch (for instance, to answer the phone), it immediately fell into pieces and had to be reassembled from the basic elements. Hora had designed his watches so that he could put together subassemblies of about ten components each. Ten of these subassemblies could be put together to make a larger sub-assembly. Finally, ten of the larger subassemblies constituted the whole watch. Each subassembly could be put down without falling apart.

Another sources: "My thesis has been that one path to the construction of a non-trivial theory of complex systems is by way of a theory of hierarchy. Empirically, a large proportion of the complex systems we observe in nature exhibit hierarchic structure. On theoretical grounds we could expect complex systems to be hierarchies in a world in which complexity had to evolve from simplicity." – Herbert Simon, 1962 (at [1]).

Why is it organisation? That is a misspelling. It should be organization...