Gloria DeGaetano - Parenting As A Living System

Parenting As A Living System (cont.)

In 1844, the chemist Liebig postulated that chemists could produce organic substances—chemicals found in nature—but that they wouldn’t be able to produce an eye or a leaf. Liebig’s observations led to the theory of vitalism, “that the phenomena of life cannot be fully understood in terms of physical laws derived only for the study of inanimate systems, but an additional causal factor is at work in living systems.” (Sheldrake p. 43)

There is something beyond the sum of the parts of living things that produce its whole. If we do not genetically alter—interfere—with nature, living things predictably grow into what they originally started out as. For instance, an oak tree always stays an oak tree—you don’t plant an acorn and expect a willow tree. The self-identity of living things is an emergent process, and whether developing from a seed or embryo, the whole is always in it—it has to be nurtured to grow over time. In a real sense, the mighty oak is in that acorn and we can count on it to emerge—if given the proper nourishment to do so.

Although vitalism helped make a conceptual shift, there were many other changes occurring in all the sciences that would add more layers of complexity to this theory. Viewing life as an interrelated and dynamic whole, rather than as mechanical parts ushered in “systems sciences.” Writing in The Systems View of the World, Ervin Laszlo explains this development in understandable terms:

“The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the breakdown of mechanistic theory even within physics, the science where it was most successful. Sets of interacting relationships came to occupy the center of attention, and these were of staggering complexity…that the ability of Newtonian mechanics to provide an explanation had to be seriously questioned. Relativity took over in the field of physics, and the science of quantum theory in microphysics. The progress of investigation in other sciences followed parallel paths…new laws had to be postulated—not laws of “Life forces” (as in vitalism), but laws of integrated wholes, acting as such. Just as the science of economics proved to be incapable of explaining the rise of stock prices on the basis of the individual personalities of stockbrokers and public, so the science of biology was unable to explain the self-preservation of the animal organism by recourse to the physical laws governing the behavior of its atoms and molecules. New laws were postulated, which did not contradict physical laws but complemented them. They showed what highly complex sets of things, each subject to the basic laws of physics, do when they act together. In view of parallel developments in physics, chemistry, biology, sociology and economics, many branches of the contemporary sciences became in Warren Weaver’s phrase, ‘sciences of organized complexity’—that is, systems sciences.” (Laszlo, p. 8)

The notion of systems sciences led to a way of viewing life from a living system perspective. In 1978 James Grier Miller, a biologist, wrote Living Systems, presenting a way to think about the natural world as “nonrandom accumulations of matter-energy in physical space-time into interacting, interrelated subsystems or components.” He later posited eight “nested” hierarchical levels in such complex structures. Each level is “nested” in the sense that each higher level contains the next lower level in a nested fashion. His theory assumed that all nature is a continuum, organized into complex patterns that repeat themes and variations. “From the ceaseless streaming of protoplasm to the many-vectored activities of supranational systems, there are continuous flows through living systems as they maintain their highly organized steady states.” (Miller, p. 1025)

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