Why Systems Sciene Education?

Background

This course is about science and the scientific process of learning about how the world (and universe) works. It is an introduction to science as a way of thinking and discovering the rules of how things work, how things got to be what they are as we observe them today, and from both their current state and the rules we derive what things might be like in the future.

Traditionally education about science has been by students simply taking an introductory science course in physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, or any number of disciplines where they learn the specifics of that discipline. Students are expected to pick up the bigger ideas about science simply from experiencing the concepts and practices within a specific discipline. The problem with this approach is that it puts more emphasis on the content of a specific science rather than a general understanding of the scientific enterprise as a whole. Science is a human activity aimed at understanding the whole universe, not just a particular category of phenomena within that universe. In this course we are going to take a very different approach that is meant to provide you with a “Big Picture” view of what science is, how it works, and what it does for us as a species and a collection of societies.

The approach taken in this course is to step back and take a look at what all sciences have in common, and this includes social sciences as well as the so-called “hard” sciences. The focus is on the process of inquiry, but from a particular vantage point. It turns out that all of human questioning originates from a deep awareness of a universal property of everything we encounter in the universe. That property can be called “systemness”. Everything that you can identify as an object or entity can be looked at as a system. Moreover, these objects and entities interact with one another to form larger-scale systems. For example every planet in our Solar System is a system in its own right. They all interact with the Sun (another system) and each other through gravitational attraction and various kinds of radiation to form the Solar System. There is inherent regularity in the nature of these interactions that help the system as a whole maintain its form and dynamic behavior over a very long duration. The sciences, particularly physics and astronomy, derived the basis of those regularities and have been able to use the “Laws” so derived to our great advantage.

The questions that early astronomers, and later physicists, asked about the planets and the sun started with a recognition of the systemic properties displayed in their observations. Even before they divined the structure and behavior of all the parts they knew that they were all part of a larger system because that is the nature of things in the universe. In very similar ways scientists in all fields formulate questions about why and how phenomena occur by a tacit understanding that the components of these phenomena are always parts of a system.

Science goes in two ways. It may start with the observation of a system from the outside, say for example, an organism. It then attempts to find out what is inside the system, what its components are, and how are they related to one another. This is called reductionist science — taking things apart to find out what is inside and how they work. The other way, as in the example of the Solar System, is to observe from inside a system, its parts and their interactions as the whole system behaves. Then the objective is to understand the whole from understanding the internal structure and dynamics. This is integrative science. It is the process that often leads us to grasp laws of nature. Another example of this kind of science is understanding our societies by understanding how the components (us and our cultures) work. To be certain, understanding societies is a much more daunting task than understanding the Solar System!

So the approach in this class is quite different than is standard. We will be examining the nature of Systems Science as an over-arching framework for all of the sciences, and, specifically, systems thinking, which is a more holistic way to look at science. Today very nearly all of the disciplinary sciences, hard and social alike, have branches called “Systems X”, such as systems biology, or systems ecology, or systems chemistry, or systems psychology! This is because scientists are coming to recognize the role of systems thinking and the property of systemness as fundamental to all that they do in their researches. They are also recognizing the inherent interdisciplinary quality of systems thinking. You cannot truly understand a biological system as merely a biological phenomenon. Systems science teaches us that the phenomenon has to be taken in context with its environment in order to be fully understood.

Principally, then, the main objective of this course is to introduce the student to systems science and systems thinking as a way to understand the big picture of science in general. Such thinking is a great starting place for going into one of the traditional disciplines.