Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

equilibrium and evolve constantly, that marks the new paradigm, which should be consideredwhen reading Boyd.An early and influential work on chaos and complexity theory, following not longafter Capra’s The Tao of Physics was authored by Eric Jantsch, titled The Self-organizing Universe(1980). He states that ‘the central aspects of the emerging paradigm of self-organization are:primo, a specific macroscopic dynamics of process systems; secundo, continuous exchange andthereby co-evolution with the environment, and tertio, self-transcendence, the evolution ofevolutionary processes’ 4 . This second stage in the shift in paradigm has had an obvious anddemonstrable influence on Boyd. Boyd was not only very aware how science “works”,develops and grows through his reading of the works of Conant, Heisenberg, Gödel, Kuhnand other books on the philosophy of science. Boyd was also conscious of the changes inscience occurring around him during the three decades he developed his ideas on war andstrategy. He devoured popular scientific studies describing the scientific developmentsduring his own time. For instance the list of sources used for Patterns of Conflict shows he readHoyle’s work The New Face of Science, as noted before the immensely influential book Order outof Chaos by Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers and Fritjof Capra’s The Tao ofPhysics, as well as various other works on entropy, the science of the mind and evolution(including as already stated Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene). The list of personal papersincludes moreover annotated early works that described this development, such asJohn Briggs and F.David Peat; Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness (1984)Ernst Mayr; The Growth of Biological Thought (1982)Heinz Pagels; The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature (1982)Heinz Pagels; The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity (1988)Nick Herbert; Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics (1987)James Gleick; Chaos: Making a New Science (1987)Jeremy Rifkin; Entropy: A New World View (1980)Alexander Woodcock and Monte Davis; Catastrophe Theory (1980)Fred Alan Wolf; Star Wave, Mind, Consciousness and Quantum Physics (1984)Gary Zukav; The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (1979)The works he was reading and re-reading at the time of his death are almost exclusivelyconcerned with the ‘new sciences’ as they are sometimes referred to. In several of thesebooks, of which several have become bestsellers, the shift in paradigm, the contours ofwhich Bertalanffy already discerned, is laid out in full. They give accessible accounts ofscientific developments in various disciplines, ranging from artificial intelligence, quantumphysics, cosmology, biology, neurophysiology and genetics.Common to these books is that they lay out the inadequacy of the deterministic,mechanistic, reductionist Newtonian view of the world. Most of them refer to Einstein,Heisenberg, Gödel, Bertalanffy and Prigogine and describe in detail the concepts anddiscoveries concisely described above. In addition, all of them build upon the systemtheoretical view and refine the understanding of dynamical systems. They describe newconcepts to explain systems behavior. Combined, they form a new ‘world view ofdescriptors’. In this chapter a number of key concepts that feature prominently in thesebooks and that combined form the emerging ‘worldview’, will be described. For an initialimpression of what the emerging worldview entails, the list of keywords below is included 5 .4 Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe, Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm ofEvolution, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1980, p.9.5 Adapted from Eric B. Dent, 'Complexity Science: A Worldview Shift', Emergence, Vol. 1, issue 4(1999), p.8123