BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

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ZOOIDS 1)2)4)

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The small individual organisms that compose colonial ones.

Some examples are the amoebae that constitute the collective form of the slime mould Dictyostelium discoideum; or the thousands of small animals that compose the Portuguese man-of-war (Physalia).

It is in fact their integration in a functional individual on a higher level of complexity at which they interact in new emerging specific ways which differentiate the zooids from similar elements in a more autonomous condition.

The extensive use of the term has been sometimes criticized. However, each organism is in fact a collectivity, whether of cells, or of more complex individuals, as in a beehive or a swarm of ants… or human societies.

At the living systems level, zooids are similar to particles in atoms, atoms in simple or more complex molecules and organic molecules as living matter components.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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