Living systems (entities) possess the property of maintaining their organization by continual renewal or production of components by themselves. Based on this self-maintenance ability, they reproduce systems of similar organization. This two-fold property forms unique hierarchical organizations, foreign to physical systems. This paper explores how the living world is organized by the two-fold property, where two types of hierarchical organizations, or part-whole relationships, are distinguished: one is synchronic participation in organizing an entity; the other is diachronic. The former implies that the composition of an entity is fixed through time, regardless of organizational patterns, while the latter involves changes in composition to maintain a pattern. Both types of organization are mathematically formalized, and organizational hierarchies of the living world are analyzed in biological space-time. This analysis reveals that biological systems are arrayed in a complex two-dimensional hierarchical matrix of synchronic and diachronic organization.
CITATION STYLE
Nakajima, T. (2004). Synchronic and diachronic hierarchies of living systems. International Journal of General Systems, 33(5), 505–526. https://doi.org/10.1080/0308107042000193525
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