Principles of Systems and Cybernetics: an evolutionary perspective

A set of fundamental principles for the cybernetics domain is sketched, based on the spontaneous emergence of systems through variation and selection. The (mostly self-evident) principles are: selective retention, autocatalytic growth, asymmetric transitions, blind variation, recursive systems construction, selective variety, requisite knowledge and incomplete knowledge. Existing systems principles, such as self-organization, “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”, and order from noise can be reduced to implications of these more primitive laws. Others, such as the law of requisite variety, the 2 law of thermodynamics, and the law of maximum entropy production are clarified, or restricted in their scope.