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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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From a modeling standpoint, the answer to this question 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 underlying reality, only one viable concept emerged that could integrate all these 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 are the Attributes of a Living System?
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Well-established definitions generally indicate that a living system is a life form that can live and survive autonomously for a time within its environment. From a living system’s viewpoint, everything outside its perimeter is part of that 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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For a living system to sustain its existence, it must interact with its environment to carry out certain basic life functions. 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. At the species level, these results are subject to evolution through natural selection.
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It is easy to see how these very general statements might apply to a wide variety of living systems. But what happens when you get into specific examples drawn from cells, organisms, and also superorganisms?
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How will a Model Help?
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Early in my investigations, I noticed a strong similarity among the governance structures within cells, organisms, and nation-state superorganisms. If the governance structures are similar, wouldn't the essential structures of all living systems also be similar? What if all three levels of living system had the same underlying architecture? And where would I obtain the information necessary to validate this idea? The only way I could think of was to plunge in, and develop a living systems model.
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As a result, the objective of this effort is to is to create a comprehensive and coherent model of living systems, their structure, and how they function. Although most of the discussion and examples that follow focus on human organisms, the intent is for this model is to encompass all eukaryotic living organisms, and validate the theory that:
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| Every Living System Has the Same Basic Architectural Structure |
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My approach has been to reverse engineer the inherent design of living systems, building on our existing knowledge base. I assume that ideas about living systems from different disciplinary perspectives are all correct and useful in some way. The challenge is to synthesize a common conceptual framework within which all viewpoints can be represented.
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In this light, 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 accepting the variety of established ideas about living systems as compatible views from different perspectives of the same reality. And "Terminology" seeks to rationalize the relevant concepts and descriptions employed within 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 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 an adult 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 complexities. This provides a framework for explaining the influences of both natural environment and culture as human organism emerges and grows. A three-level 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.
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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.
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