The Rules of the Ring

Abstract

Although it may be fashionable to acknowledge that everything is connected to everything else in principle, some things are more tightly connected to each other than to all the rest. Such a little knot of causal interactions goes by the name of a system. It is also fashionable to speak of one’s playthings as systems, and I shall adhere to this convention. It will make life easier in the long run to clarify some conventional jargon at this point, as follows.

As scientists we do not merely read the book of Nature. We write it... How much more so then the biologist, who deals with reality of such elusive complexity that only deliberate simplification can cloak it with the appearance of intelligibility. Nevertheless, this is the way our science progresses. But we must accept our concepts for what they are, provisional approximations that are as much fiction of our minds as they are faithful depictions of the facts.

Christian de Duve, 1969