By Mario deSantis, August 30, 1998

Premise:

In his book "The Web of Life", Fritjof Capra satisfies his lifelong effort to see man liberated from the constraints and alienation of an artificially fragmented world [refer to Capra's other works: The Tao of Physics, The Turning Point, Uncommon Wisdom, Belonging to the Universe] and proposes the theory of living systems as a synthesis of current scientific models and theories. This proposed theory unifies the conceptual understanding of mind, matter and life, and brings forth "the web of life", that is the notion that all phenomena are interwoven and interdependent.

The spiritual closeness and interdependence of man with nature is expressed poetically by the following two poems:
 

Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.

The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man.

We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father's graves and his children's birthright is forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert.

---Chief Seattle (Sealth)

This we know. The earth does not belong to us: we belong to the earth. This we know. All things are connected, like the blood that unites one family. Wate'er befalls the earth, befalls the children of earth. This we know. We did not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the earth, we do to ourselves. This we know.

---Chief Seattle (Sealth)

The modern scientific revolution started with Galileo Galilei when he restricted the role of science to any phenomena which could be measured. The conceptualization of a rational and measurable world continued with Rene' Descartes with the creation of analytical thinking whereby the behaviour of complex phenomena were studied by analysing the properties of their parts. Finally, the world was reduced to a perfect machine governed by exact mathematical formulae when Newton discovered the gravitational law. This view of the world as a machine was maintained by Einstein as well; in fact, after he discovered the law of relativity, he strived, in vain, to search for a mathematical formula which would condense all the laws of physics [Order Out of Chaos, by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Bantam Books, 1984, page 2].

Our perception, to see a world governed by exact universal laws and made up of separate parts, has been the cause of man's alienation with nature and of the present division of human society by nation, race, religion, economics and politics. This fragmentary perception of the world provided the background for seeing life as a struggle for the survival of the fittest and reinforced a social cultural behaviour, based on the exercise of power, which has caused and sometime justified the worst forms of social injustices and exploitation [Coping with changes: an overview of the Learning Organization, Knowledge Economy and current practices in information technology applications, by Mario deSantis, June 1997].
 

The widespread scientific approach to study complex phenomena involving many interconnected variables and use the assumption ceteris paribus--all other things being equal-- is highly inadequate![Order Out of Chaos, by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Bantam Books, 1984, page xi] We must recognize that all scientific concepts and theories are approximate [THE WEB OF LIFE, by Fritjof Capra, Anchor Books, 1996, page 41]; therefore, scientists would be better of using approximate system approaches--such as simulation and probabilistic techniques--rather than trying to artificially find exact mathematical solutions! There are not universal exact mathematical solutions to describe natural phenomena; and this is especially so, when we realize that the world is not an objective static reality after all! [INFINITE POTENTIAL: the life and times of David Bohm, byDavid Peat, Addison-Wesley, 1996, page 274]

With the rejection of the world machine, Capra went back to the notion of an organic, living, and spiritual universe, that is "the web of life" where every phenomena and living organism are interconnected as a whole. In living systems, cells combine to form tissues, tissues to form organs, organs to form organisms [THE WEB OF LIFE, by Fritjof Capra, Anchor Books, 1996, page 28], and organisms to form social systems; as a consequence, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Today, the Newtonian machine is being replaced by the living organism, and complex phenomena are not studied anymore in terms of their building blocks or parts, but in terms of organizational relationships among all the members of the whole.