Cybernetics & Human Knowing - Thesaurus pilot project
Edited by M&T Thellefsen

Ontogeny

Definition

Put another way, ontogeny is "...the history of maintenance of [the system's] identity through continuous autopoiesis in the physical space." (Varela, 1979a, p. 32)

The process of self-organization of a biological system, starting form an initial structure.

Relations:

phylogeny

		development
		self-organization

Definitions:

Principia Cybernetica
Encyclopedia Autopoietica
International Encyclopedia of Systems & Cybernetics

 

Principia Cybernetica (web)

Encyclopedia Autopoietica

Put another way, ontogeny is "...the history of maintenance of [the system's] identity through continuous autopoiesis in the physical space." (Varela, 1979a, p. 32)

Varela (1979a, p. 32) states, "Although the changes that an autopoietic system may undergo without loss of identity while compensating its deformations under interactions are determined by its organization, the sequence of such changes is determined by the sequence of these deformations."

Combined with the indistinguishability of internal vs. external perturbations, this intertwining of structural determination (synchronic state transformation) and ontogenic coupling (diachronic course of coupling) into a single ontogeny induces: (1) a complexity or richness of potential behaviors; and (2) a complexity of potential descriptions for those behaviors. As such, structural / ontogenic determinism cannot be equated with strict causal determinism unless the observer has full and unequivocal access to both the structural state and ontogenic history of the observed in addition to access to unequivocal predictive rules governing the observed's transformations.

cf. structural coupling

International Encyclopedia of Systems & Cybernetics

The process of self-organization of a biological system, starting form an initial structure.

E. JANTSCH defines the very similar term of "ontogeny" as "the evolution of self-organizing space-time structure in a coherent way through changes in the dynamic regime" and adds that "It arises from dissipative self-organization which in principle, defeats any structural permanency (NICOLIS and PRIGOGINE, 1977) and may be interpreted as dynamic self-reference – not with respect to a single structure, but with respect to an evolutionary path of structures. The system is self-referential in terms of its own evolution.

It would be interesting to translate the concept into the study of animal and human societies: How do they organize themselves in coherent complex systems.