Introduction

These pages introduce the development of a model of living systems. The purpose is to examine life from a cohesive system point of view that integrates and builds on available knowledge from a variety of disciplines.
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In this presentation, the overall model structure is now fairly complete, but many ideas still need to be fleshed out and clarified with examples and references. At this stage, the material is more in the form of a journey of discovery than a finished product. It still needs to be reorganized into a precise presentation of the resulting model.
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The unfinished material is presented at this time as a vehicle for discussion, and your feedback and suggestions are solicited. You may find that it includes audacious statements about the nature of life and the world. Many of these are boxed and highlighted in yellow, and I encourage you to give me some feedback on both your personal reaction and their meaningfulness as modeling concepts.
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My Background
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Much of my career was spent helping large companies implement a business enterprise modeling method that I had developed. While working to improve the modeling method, I made a surprising discovery:
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Every Business Enterprise Has the Same Basic Architectural Structure

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This realization made it vastly simpler to model a company's business. It allowed me to start with a complete standard business structure and then add refinements and modifications to reflect the unique characteristics of the business at hand.
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Later, I was asked to try my hand at modeling a city and its government. I knew that some internal operations of a city resemble those of a business, but had no conceptual framework for viewing a city as a single unified system.
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What is a City?
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The first question to be dealt with was "What is a city?" From a modeling standpoint, the answer was not at all clear, and this led to several frustrating years of research and study of existing materials on the subject. No single branch of knowledge provided a complete unified concept of a city entity, so I worked at synthesizing the ideas from multiple disciplines such as sociology, psychology, biology, anthropology and systems theory. By treating all of these perspectives as different views of the same reality, only one viable concept emerged that could integrate all the ideas within a single framework:
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A Nation, with Its States and Cities, is a Living System

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What is a Living System?
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A living system is a life form that can live and survive autonomously for a time within its environment. Living systems exist at multiple levels: cell, organism, superorganism. From a living system’s viewpoint, everything outside its perimeter is part of its environment. A particular kind of living system is constructed to live in a specific kind of environment, and is dependent on that environment for its existence.
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To sustain its existence, a living system must interact with its environment to carry out certain basic life functions. These include processes such as ingestion of raw material, internal distribution, conversion into energy, extrusion of waste, movement, and reproduction.
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An individual living system has a limited life cycle (birth, reproduction, death). It produces offspring by creating a new entity based on its own design. The reproduction process introduces small random variations into the new design. Some design variations improve a living system’s ability to survive in its environment, and some degrade that ability. The results are subject to evolution through natural selection.
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Development of a Living Systems Model
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The objective of this effort is to produce a comprehensive and coherent model of living systems, their structure, and how they function. Although many of the discussion and examples used here focuus on human organisms, the intent is for this model is to encompass all living organisms, based on the theory that:
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Every Living System Has the Same Basic Architectural Structure

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My approach to development of a model for living systems is essentially a reverse engineering of their inherent design. Building on the existing knowledge base, the discussions that follow are concerned with structure, knowledge and terminology. Structure focuses on identifying the underlying architectural framework of living systems, both physical and conceptual. Knowledge refers to the mechanisms by which organisms understand and interact with things in the world. And Terminology seeks to rationalize the relevant definitions and descriptions used by different disciplines.
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Structure of this Presentation
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As shown in the sidebar, the living systems material is divided into two main parts: Living Systems Operation; and Living Systems Development.
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Living Systems Operation focuses on the structure and purposeful characteristics of fully-developed, operating living systems. It examines some details of where they came from, how they are constructed, what they are trying to do, and how they do it. It identifies the key life functions that must be performed for a living system to exist and operate within its environment.
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Living Systems Development shifts to a higher perspective to examine the life cycle of all living systems, from creation to death. It lays out the development sequence for living systems of different levels and compexities. This provides a framework for explaining the influences of environment and culture a human organism emerges and grows. A superorganism perspective is used to show how higher- and lower-level living systems are constrained to develop in tandem, and how this has defined and determined our human organism's view of life and relationship with the world.

Living Systems Operation begins with Origin and Evolution which describes how living systems evolved from simple cells into a three-level cell-organism-superorganism structure.