Re: ecological complexity

Norman K. McPhail (norm@SOCAL.WANET.COM)
Thu, 23 Jul 1998 12:58:31 -0700


Don Mikulecky wrote:
>
> Don Mikulecky replies:
> Most all of nature as i know it is self organizing. Shake up oil and
> water...they
> separate....put a drop of dye in the water..it spreads out. is this self
> organization or not? If not why not?
> respectfully,
> Don

I think it is a form a self organizing and your point is well taken.
Still, how would you go about dealing with the gradients and qualities
of self organizing processes? Is it semantically ok just to drop the
self organizing quality out of the equation and reduce the differences
to comparative complexity? Or do we need both the quality of self
organizing and the quantity of complexity in the process to benefit from
the modeling relation?

Norm