Superscience: its mythology and legitimisation

Erich Jantsch was a philosopher and visionary. Sadly, he died last year in his early fifties. The Self-Organizing Universe [Erich Jantsch. Pergamon Press, Oxford 1980] was his last book. In it he refined the ideas already eloquently expressed in a large number of articles and in particular in his previous book Design for Evolution [George Brazillier, New York 1975] and indeed brought them to their logical conclusion.

This book is dedicated to Ilya Prigogine, the "catalyst of the self-organization paradigm"; rightly so, since Jantsch's philosophy is above all an extension of Prigogine's ideas and it is only in the context of these ideas that it can really be understood.

For this reason I shall consider Prigogine's philosophy first and foremost and indicate when necessary how Jantsch interprets it and seeks further to elaborate it.

Ilya Prigogine is probably the most influential intellectual figure in the French speaking world today. Such eminent intellectual figures as Edgar Morin, Henri Atlan, Jacques Robin and even the brilliant economist René Passet have accepted his theories almost in their entirety. There are a few dissenting voices - that of Danchon, for instance, who has bitterly attacked Prigogine's ideas in a letter to La Recherche [1] and also René Thom who has done so in a letter to Le Débat. [2] What is certain is that Prigogine's ideas, though not essentially new, are formulated in an original way. They fit in together extremely well, and what is more, they provide a coherent and all-embracing paradigm or world-view.

One of the things we know about such structures of beliefs is that, above all, they provide a means of rationalising - and hence of legitimising - a particular policy or way of life. In this respect they fulfil the same function as the mythology developed by a tribal society to rationalise - and hence to legitimise - its particular social behaviour pattern.

I think this is clear to the more thoughtful philosophers of science. It is certainly clear to Michael Polanyi who explicitly compared a scientific paradigm to the mythology of a tribal society (The Azande). [3] It is also clear to Monod who prefers the term 'metaphysical epistemology' to paradigm or world view:

"De Platen à Whitehead, de d'Heraclite à Hégel et Marx, il est évident que ces épistemologies métaphysiques ont toujours été intimement associées aux idées morales et politiques de leurs auteurs. Ces édifices idéologiques, présentés comme a priori étaient en réalité des constructions a posteriori destinées à justifier un thème éthico-politique préconcu." [4]

It is easy to see that this is true of the various paradigms that most shape our thoughts today. Keynsian economics, for instance, is above all a means of rationalising a specific strategy for dealing with unemployment, that which consists in financing new jobs by increasing government expenditure, a strategy that was applied by Roosevelt in his New Deal - long before the appearance of Keynes' General Theory.

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations by showing that it is by behaving in the most egoistic way possible that man can not only best serve his own material interests but also those of society at large, provided a means of rationalising the individualism and egoism that inevitably prevailed with the breakdown of society that accompanied the industrial revolution.

This same fatal trend was further legitimised -somewhat differently - by Freud. His paradigm for explaining pathological human behaviour took the already almost defunct family and community to be the source of all our repressions and frustrations, which he assured us could only be eliminated by still further atomising our society.

This being so, it seems perfectly legitimate to ask what is the social behaviour pattern that Prigogine's paradigm is designed to rationalise and hence legitimise.

Our priorities

Particularly revealing on this score is Prigogine's interview with Michel Salomon which appeared in Prospective et Santé. [5] From it we learn, among other things, that he is not the least concerned about what must be one of the most frightening features of the world we live in; the population explosion:

"I don't see why a population increase per se should be a negative phenomenon. On the contrary, I regard it as a positive phenomenon. The interaction between men has always generated ideas and development."

It is difficult to believe that the "ideas and development" that this interaction is likely to generate in the next decades, will provide much solace to the 1,000 million or so people (a quarter of the world's population) who are expected, by serious students of these problems, to die of starvation during this period. [6]

If Prigogine does not regard feeding the world in the next decades as a problem, it is, he tells Salomon, because he has just returned from China, "and in that immense country only 20 percent of the land is used for agriculture". He does not realise of course that by world standards, this is a lot. The total terrestrial surface of this globe is approximately 13 billion hectares and only 1.3 billion hectares (i.e. 10 percent) are used for agricultural purposes, while little more useful land, as FAO has itself admitted, remains to be put under the plough. The outlook is in fact grimmer in China, where every inch of cultivable land is already meticulously and painstakingly cultivated.

Prigogine also assures us that in the USSR, there remain vast areas of desert which could be restored to agricultural use. This too is a vain hope, as the rate at which deserts are being brought back to agricultural use is considerably lower than that at which they are being created - an estimated 50,000 square kilometres per year.

Still more revealing are the goals that, according to him, we must achieve if we are to solve the problems that confront us today. The first is thermo-nuclear fusion. This implies that he sees increased energy use, and hence the new technologies that it can power, as the principal means of solving the problems that confront us today. These problems, as readers of The Ecologist well know, are due to the breakdown of natural systems under the impact of technology and industry - and new technologies, rather than restore the proper functioning of these systems, can do no more than assure their further disintegration.

What is more, even Abelson, that technomaniac editor of the journal Science, admits that the cost of commercial fusion reactors (assuming them to be technically feasible) will be four or five times higher than that of normal fission reactors, which are already so much beyond our means that since 1973, in the USA, the richest country in the world, more than 200 orders have had to be cancelled.

Our next priority according to Prigogine is to understand climate, presumably so as to modify it to suit our short-term needs. This is also unrealistic. It has taken thousands of millions of years to develop a relatively stable and predictable climate so that, among other things, farmers know when to sow and when to reap. World climate is undoubtedly already changing under the impact of our industrial enterprises and, to set about changing it purposefully, can only further destabilise it.

Next, he tells us, we must understand how deserts are created - a very laudable aim but one that has already, to all practical purposes, been achieved since we know quite enough about the creation of deserts to avoid creating them and enough, too, to realise that it is logistically and financially impossible to restore them, on any scale, once they have been created.

Our next priority, according to Prigogine, is the development of genetic engineering - that ultimate anti-evolutionary enterprise which all thinking people know can only lead to the annihilation of whole populations of human and non-human animals but which the cynical might well hail as the only really effective strategy devised so far by our industrial society, for controlling its exploding population.

Our final goal, according to Prigogine, is the creation of colonies in space which, he tells us, should not be all that difficult as there must be many planets in other solar systems that are habitable by man. Of course the idea of supporting whole populations on artificial planets in other solar systems (to which the very basic necessities of life, such as oxygen to breathe, water to drink and food to eat, must be transported from our planet) is quite preposterous. Today we cannot afford to keep more than a small minority of people in a style that they consider is their due on our own planet where the conditions required to sustain them are readily available.

It should be clear then, at least to readers of The Ecologist that Prigogine is but another victim of the Great Misinterpretation. [7] Rather than see the terrible problems that confront our society today as the symptoms of the breakdown of natural systems - biological organisms, societies and ecosystems - under the impact of 'development' (and its latest phase industrialisation), he sees them as the symptoms of under-development and under-industrialisation - and proposes, as the only means of solving them, the acceleration and elaboration, particularly in the field of genetic engineering, of the very processes that have brought these problems into being.

It is the impending Biotechnic Revolution, as we shall see, that he regards today as having the most to contribute to our prosperity and welfare, and he is not alone in believing this. Many scientists regard this field as offering limitless possibilities. After all, micro-organisms are not in finite supply as are the resources entering into the industrial processes of today. Nor is there any limit to the range of goods and services which, by tinkering with their genes, they can be programmed to provide. Nor does this novel production process give rise to the sort of chemical pollution that our biosphere is ever less capable of absorbing.

It is largely to rationalise, and hence legitimise, these beliefs that Prigogine has built up his paradigm, his 'metaphysical epistemology' or 'mythology' depending on how one prefers to regard it.

Prigogine's paradigm

What then are the main features of this paradigm? First of all, and very much to his credit, Prigogine accepts, contrary to Georgescu Roegen and Rifkin, that classical thermodynamics do not apply to the world of living things. The biosphere is simply too sophisticated to be the product of the process of global decline which the entropy law tells us we have been experiencing since the beginning of time:

"Even in the simplest cells the metabolic function includes several thousand coupled chemical reactions and, as a consequence, requires a delicate mechanism for their coordination and regulation. In other words, we need an extremely sophisticated functional organisation. Furthermore, the metabolic reactions require specific catalysts, the enzymes, which are large molecules possessing a spatial organization, and the organism must be capable of synthesising these substances ... Each enzyme, or catalyst, performs a complex sequence of operations, we find that it is organised along exactly the same lines as a modern assembly line ... Such an organization is quite clearly not the result of an evolution toward molecular disorder." [8]

Since he has accepted this, one would have expected him to forget about thermodynamics and set about explaining the behaviour of the world of living things in terms of a different set of laws - those, for instance, that govern the behaviour of biological, social and ecological systems. But Prigogine is very much an Aristo-scientist. For him Science is essentially Physics and it is in terms of this master discipline that the world should be explained. More important, were he to look at the world in terms of basic biological, social and ecological concepts, it would no longer be possible to maintain the credibility of his thesis.

Having found that classical thermodynamics was irrelevant, Prigogine developed his 'non-linear thermodynamics' that was designed to apply precisely to those conditions to which classical thermodynamics (and, in particular, the entropy law) did not apply. It is for this achievement that Prigogine earned his Nobel Prize.

Classical thermodynamics tells us that the dissipation of the sun's energy on our planet can only give rise to entropy which is wrongly identified with biospheric disorder. [7] Non-linear thermodynamics tells us that this need not be so. In certain conditions, the dissipation of the sun's energy on our planet can give rise to two different types of organisation. The first, Prigogine refers to as a 'non-equilibrium stationary state.' The systems that fall into this category are referred to by Jantsch as "static or dynamic steady-state equilibrium systems." Such systems are "structure preserving", in other words they do not change.

Jantsch [9] regards the solar system and its rotating planets as providing examples of such a structure. Prigogine [8] cites a crystal. These structures display 'order' of a type that can apparently be explained on the basis of Boltzman's Ordering Principle. This is a means of determining statistically "the structure of the equilibrium states" or rather the distribution of molecules in the various energy states of a system (he is not referring to living systems but to gases and such-like). The formula is Pi - e - Ei/kT, where Pi the probability, Ei the energy at the chosen level, k Boltzman's famous constant, and T the temperature.

If one knows the value of Boltzman's constant k, the temperature T and the energy Ei of the chosen level (assuming the system to have three energy levels) then Boltzman's formula tells us that, at a low temperature, nearly all the molecules will be in the lowest energy state. At a high temperature, however, the three probabilities become roughly equal, which means that there are about the same number of molecules in each of the energy states.

In certain conditions, however, the dissipation of the sun's energy gives rise to structures of quite a different type, which Prigogine refers to as 'dissipative structures' and whose occurrence is apparently unpredictable on the basis of Boltzman's Ordering Principle. These, as Prigogine shows, are governed instead by a totally different ordering principle which Prigogine refers to as "order through fluctuations".

This works in the following way. One starts off with an initial state of randomness or 'homogeneity'. This homogeneity is affected by fluctuations. Rather than being controlled or 'damped', as fluctuations tend to be in stable systems, they are on the contrary 'amplified' and it is this amplification that gives rise to the dissipative structures.

Let us look at some examples of dissipative structures. Jantsch [9] describes the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction discovered in 1958. Apparently, if bromate is introduced into a sulphuric acid solution in which malonic acid as well as cerium, iron or manganese ions are present, then the malonic acid will oxidise. If other conditions are satisfied (though Jantsch does not specify what these are)

"concentric or rotating spiral waves may be observed which lead to interference patterns. In this and similar reaction systems, pulsations of great regularity may be observed which may last for many hours."

A second example is that of the Benard convection, a sort of whirlpool which is constantly quoted by Prigogine and his disciples. This is how Prigogine describes it:

"Consider a horizontal layer of fluid between two infinite parallel planes in a constant gravitational field and let us maintain the lower boundary at temperature Ti and the higher boundary at temperature T2 with Ti = T2. For a sufficiently large value of the 'adverse' gradient (Ti-T2) (T1+T2), the state of rest becomes unstable and convection starts. Entropy production is then increased because the convection is a new mechanism for heat transport. Moreover, the motions of the currents that appear after convection has been established are more highly organised than are the microscopic motions in the state of rest. In fact, large numbers of molecules must move in a coherent fashion over observable distances for a sufficiently long time for there to be a recognisable pattern or flow. On the basis of Boltzman's Ordering Principle, there is zero probability for the occurrence of Benard's convection. Small convections occur as fluctuations from the average state, but below a certain critical value of the temperature gradient, these fluctuations are damped and disappear.

However, above this critical value, certain fluctuations are amplified and give rise to a macroscopic current. A new molecular order appears that basically corresponds to a giant fluctuation stabilised by the exchange of energy with the outside world. This is the order characterized by the occurrence of what are referred to as dissipative structures."

A third example that is constantly cited was first described by Von Neuman. It concerns the behaviour of small magnetized cubes which may occasionally be induced to organise themselves spontaneously and to form recognisable patterns.

Living dissipative structures

Living things, if they are in a state of change, can also fall into the category of dissipative structures. Among them, Prigogine cites the termites' nest and the slime mould, when in its multicellular state.

If these can be classified in the same category as Belousov-Zhavotinsky's spiral waves, Benard's whirl-pool and von Foerster's magnetised cubes, it seems to be simply because, like the latter, they have emerged from a homogenous state, as a result of - to begin with - random fluctuations that have then become amplified.

Thus consider the development of a termites' nest. The first stage is uncoordinated and disorderly. Material is derived from various deposits which Prigogine identifies as fluctuations. A pillar or wall suddenly appears from a sufficiently large deposit and hence "from a sufficiently large fluctuation". Prigogine then tells us "that this state corresponds to the amplification of the fluctuation. Order therefore appears through fluctuation ... ".

Another example is the behaviour of the slime mould - a colony of largely independent amoeba, whose staple food is the bacteria E.Coli. When these become scarce, the amoebas react by simply joining together to form a multi-cellular plant-like organism which, it seems, is better capable of surviving on the reduced food supply. For Prigogine, the behaviour of the slime mould provides but a further confirmation of his thesis. The original population of protozoa he refers to as a 'homogenous configuration' and he sees it as being transformed via a fluctuation into a non-homogenous structure. [8]

If unstable living things are dissipative structure, so too are the components of the technosphere such as business enterprises and modern cities. Prigogine describes the process leading to the establishment of a factory in just the same terms as he does the building of a termites' nest.

To begin with there is homogeneity in that the population is evenly distributed throughout the city; the building of the factory corresponds to a fluctuation. This leads people to concentrate in the vicinity of the factory in order to obtain employment, which corresponds to the development of a dissipative structure. As Prigogine puts it.

"the appearance of this economic function will destroy the initial uniformity of the population distribution by creating employment opportunities that concentrate the population at a point." [10]

By blurring in this way the essential difference between the behaviour of living things and that of inanimate things, Prigogine and Jantsch can legitimise the development of the world that the Biotechnic revolution is likely to give rise to - to justify what Prigogine refers to as that "nouvel état de nature que l'activité humaine contribue à faire éxister".

He is quite explicit in insisting that the "développement de cette nouvelle nature, peuplée de machines et de technique, le développement des pratiques sociales et culturelles, la croissance des villes ... " is similar to the development of plants. They are both "processus continus et culturelles" - part in fact of the same evolutionary process.

So must of course be genetic engineering, thermonuclear fusion and the setting up of colonies in space, in fact all those developments that he regards as necessary for solving the problems that confront our society today.

Jantsch provides even more outlandish examples of dissipative structures. He tells us that "God himself is like a dissipative structure as is the Buddhist Shunayta". The Universe he tells us "is itself comparable to a dissipative structure". [11] Unfortunately, he does not tell us much about the amplified fluctuations which have led to the development of God, of the Buddhist Shunyata or of the Universe.

Elsewhere he goes quite beserk in his enthusiasm for dissipative structures.

"Possibly ... stars and the cores of galaxies but certainly ecosystems, the worldwide Gaia System of the Bio-plus atmosphere ... social systems, civilisation and culture are no less dissipative self-organising systems than are ideas, paradigms, the whole system of science, religions and the images we hold of ourselves and of our roles in the evolution of the universe." [12]

Indeed to the faithful everything is seen either as a fluctuation or dissipative structure.

Popper [13] describes how the converts to Marx's Theory of History, Freud's psychology and Adler's Individual Psychology reacted in exactly the same way:

"Once your eyes were opened, you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth: who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest or because of the repressions which were still 'unanalysed' and crying aloud for treatment."

Conditions in which dissipative structures will occur

If Prigogine and Jantsch do not make it at all clear precisely under what conditions non-equilibrium steady-state structures will occur, they are still less clear as to the conditions required for the development of dissipative structures. Prigogrne tells us that "change from equilibrium chemical systems that include catalytic mechanisms, may lead to dissipative structures". [8] Note the 'may'. Elsewhere he tells us that "spontaneous formations of such structures" include

"openness with respect to the exchange of energy and matter with the environment, far from equilibrium conditions and auto or cross catalytic steps in the reaction chain. This last point means that certain molecules participate in reactions in which they are necessary for the format of molecules of their own kind (autocatalysis) or first for the formation of molecules of an intermediate kind and subsequently of their own kind crosscatalysis". [14],

Jantsch [11,12] is hardly more helpful. He tells us that

"systems capable of dissipative self-organisation are open in their relations with the environment; internally far from equilibrium; organised in hypercycles (or their equivalent); autopoietic in their function (which also includes the internal reinforcement of fluctuation); structured in dissipative space-time structures; evolving through an indefinite sequence of structures; and as evolving into other systems in ultracycles."

How do they justify this vagueness? Presumably the laws governing the development of dissipative structures cannot be formulated with precision because, as Prigogine tells us, Nature is not governed by such Laws. As he writes himself

"Les chemins de la nature ne peuvent être prévus avec certitude, in part d'accident y est irreductible: la nature bifurcante est celle où de petites differences, des fluctuations insignificantes, peuvent, si elles se produisent dans des circonstances opportunes, envahir tout le système, engendrer un régime de fonctionnement nouveau". [10]

It must follow that the Prigogine-Jantsch paradigm, has no predictive value, and hence does not provide any useful information for controlling behaviour and adapting to environmental changes.

Why non-linear thermodynamics?

What Prigogine does tell us about the conditions in which dissipative structures may occur is nevertheless significant. To begin with the system must be open to energy from the outside. 'Auto-catalysis' must also occur. This autocatalysis he describes [8] as the participation of certain molecules "in reactions in which they are necessary for the formation of molecules of their own kind".

Presumably this is what is normally referred to as reproduction. Another condition is the occurrence of cross-catalysis; "the formation of molecules of an intermediate kind and subsequently of their own kind" - by which he presumably means the development of an informational medium, such as DNA, in which instructions will be formulated and translated into action (protein synthesis).

The question we must ask is why should it be Prigogine's amplified fluctuations that are responsible for giving rise to the dissipative structures, rather than the highly complex conditions in which these amplified fluctuations occur? The fluctuations may well be but one small factor out of a vast constellation of factors that together give rise to 'dissipative structures'.

Why should we not regard the information contained in the 'molecules of an intermediate kind', for instance, as having given rise to the dissipative structures? Why not the availability of the complex materials out of which the various molecules are made? In other words why should the development of living things be regarded purely in terms of thermodynamics of whatever variety - i.e. in terms of the dissipation of the sun's energy on our planet - rather than in terms, for instance, of informational dynamics or biodynamics or ecodynamics?

Let us take a simple process such as the cooking of that 'dissipative structure' which is a dish of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Prigogine would explain it entirely in terms of the effect on it (fluctuations) of the energy made use of. But why is the heat required to cook the roast beef more important than the skill displayed by the cook, the availability of the pan, the fats, the salt, the cook's motivation, her desire to please her husband and feed her family or to entertain important guests or, if she is an employee, the financial remuneration she will receive.

This is not to mention, of course, the long chain of events which preceded the cooking of the roast beef; its purchase at the butchers, the breeding and raising of the bullock, etc. In reality, the process involved, like all living processes, is an incredibly complex one - and to describe it simply in terms of the dissipation of energy and the fluctuations it gives rise to is to impoverish it to the point that it can only serve the interests of mystification and obscurantism.

Systems

It is quite a feat to persuade people that the Belousov-Zhavotinsky spiral waves, Benard's whirlpool, Von Neuman's arrangement of magnetised cubes, as well as paradigms, the whole system of 'science', religions, the images we hold of ourselves and our roles in the evolution of the universe, fall into the same category as cells, organisms, societies and ecosystems.

One of the expedients that Prigogine and Jantsch make use of to persuade people that this is so, is to make it appear that all these things fall into the category of 'systems' which means, of course, using the term 'system' in such a vague way that it can be used to apply to anything.

The most current definition of 'system' is that of Hall and Fagan. [15] They simply refer to it as a set of entities in dynamic interrelationship with each other, telling us nothing about the interrelationships or about the purpose and functioning of the set of entities. Such a definition can thereby apply just as well to 'natural' systems - the constituents of the biosphere - and 'unnatural' systems - those of the technosphere - or even purely arbitrary systems which play no part either.

Delattre [16] uses the term 'system' very much as do Hall and Fagan:

"On peut definir la notion de système d'une manière tres générale en disant qu'un système est un ensemble d'éléments qui interagissent entre eux et éventuellement avec le milieu exterieur."

Jaques Monod [17] rightly criticises the use of the term as being too loose;

"Quand on embrasse tout, on risque de ne rien embrasser du tout."

This is the point. If the category 'system' is to be of any use, then to show that something is a system is to convey important information about it - in particular to show that its behaviour is governed by a particular set of laws, those which govern the behaviour of systems in general. In the same way, the category 'mammal' is of value since to say that a particular form of life is 'a mammal' is to provide considerable amount of information about it.

It is to tell us, in fact, that it will display all those characteristics displayed by other 'mammals', and hence that, at a certain level of generality, its behaviour will be governed by those laws that govern the behaviour of 'mammals' in general. For this reason, Von Bertalanffy, the father of General Systems Theory, rightly reserves the use of the term 'system' to "complexes of elements in interaction to which systems laws can be applied." [18]

I think one can be still more specific and define a 'system' as "a unit of behaviour with the biosphere" - such as a biological organism, a tribal society and an ecosystem. Since their goal is the same, that of maintaining their stability (i.e. their basic structure in the face of change), we must expect them, given the limited number of materials available for the development of living things, to exploit similar strategies for achieving this goal.

This means that a certain level of generality, their behaviour must be governed by the same set of laws, just as, at a lower level of generality, a less general set of laws can be shown to govern the behaviour of all 'men' regardless of the extent to which they differ in all sorts of less general and more superficial ways.

If the categories 'systems', 'mammal' and 'men' can constitute suitable variables of a model of the biosphere that has real predictive value, it is possible to invent categories that could not possibly be of any use for this purpose. Such a category would be the yet to be invented 'funkus', which we shall take to include the sub-categories 'cigarette ends', 'indefinite articles' and 'moonlit nights'. If this category would be of little use, it is that there is little of interest that can be said that applies at once to 'cigarette ends', 'indefinite articles' and 'moonlit nights'.

It is difficult to formulate a valid set of laws which would apply to the behaviour of things falling within these sub-categories that would be of use in explaining the functioning of the world we live in. In other words, to say that something is 'funkus' does not convey any important information which enables us to predict how it is likely to behave. The trouble is that exactly the same thing can be said of Prigogine's 'systems' as it can too of his 'dissipative structures'. They are little more than glorified funkuses.

Of course to Prigogine and Jantsch, this may well be unimportant, since, as we shall see, they do not see the behaviour of living things as being bound by any specific laws - if behaviour is thereby random - so of course must be the units of behaviour.

Thus, when Jantsch tells us that the heterogenous assortment of things he classifies as a system, actually "live and evolve" [12], he is not in fact telling us very much of any value about them because for him, to "live and evolve", means very little. Both these processes are seen as purely random and thereby in no way distinguishable from other less sophisticated processes -such as the behaviour of inanimate things and in particular machines. Random systems indeed belong to a world in which there are no laws and in which all behaviour is random.

Order

Another concept that Prigogine and Jantsch misuse is that of 'order'. They try to make us believe that the order displayed by Belousov-Zhavotinsky's spiral waves, Benard's whirlpools, and Von Neuman's arrangement of magnetized cubes is the same as that displayed by living things. Though the pattern the former display is not random, in that it could undoubtedly be explained in terms of some or other physical principles, it is random to the world of living things within which the term 'order' means something very different. There are two ways in which the term is normally used in this context. The first is in terms of limitation of choice.

Thus one can talk of the multi-cellular slime-mould displaying greater 'order' than the colony of semi-independent amoeba out of which it arose. This is clearly not 'random order' but a highly directive or purposeful one; the members of the slime-mould colony do not organise themselves into a multi-cellular organism for the hell of it but because this enables them to face the new conditions more effectively than they could have done if they had remained in their former state.

The second way the term 'order' tends to be defined in the world of living things is in terms of the influence of the whole over the parts, which comes to exactly the same thing. Thus when the slime-mould is a loose colony, the influence of the colony, as a system, over its members is extremely weak - hence the wide range of choices the latter enjoy. When on the other hand, the colony is transformed into an integrated multi-cellular system, the influence of the whole over the parts becomes correspondingly greater, and their range of 'choices' correspondingly reduced.

This means that one cannot understand 'order' among living things unless one sees a system within its correct context - as part of the larger system in which it evolved and to whose influence it is subjected. As Thom points out, what may appear to be disorder at the level of a molecule can in fact reflect a high level of order from the point of view of the cell of which it is part. [2] Weiss also shows how the parts of a cell are constantly changing, growing, dying, breaking up, recombining but that all this activity is, at the cellular level, fully under control. [19] The apparent chaos is illusory: the influence of the whole (in this case the cell) over its parts is dominant and assures that the cell remains a viable unit of adaptive behaviour.

To understand their application of the term 'order' to the behaviour of living things, one must thereby introduce such notions as 'directivity, 'organisation', 'hierarchy' and 'levels of organisation' which are not part of the language of Aristo-science. Also it would be self-defeating for Prigogine and Jantsch to make use of these concepts for it would render their task very difficult of masking the essential difference between biospheric and technospheric processes.

Complexity

Another concept that Prigogine misuses is that of 'complexity'.

He is keen to prove that, contrary to basic ecological theory (see Elton), increased complexity is associated with growing instability.

The world, he points out, is becoming ever more complex - yet it is also becoming increasingly unstable. It is this instability that is reflected in the ever growing fluctuations that are everywhere apparent and which justify technospheric change and hence evolution and progress.

Professor Kenneth Mellanby [20], and other establishment ecologists, also contest the old wisdom. Their reason for doing so is to justify the use of modern agricultural practices such as large-scale monoculture and the use of poisonous chemicals, which more objective ecologists know must, by drastically reducing the complexity and diversity of agricultural ecosystems, correspondingly increase their instability - a fact that is reflected in soil erosion, desertification and the increased incidence of pest infestations.

Both Prigogine and Mellanby regard the work of May as providing the justification for their thesis. May argues that the introduction of the Japanese beetle, the European gypsy moth and the Oriental chestnut blight in North America increased the complexity of local ecosystems.

"It is trivial but not irrelevant to observe that stability was hardly enhanced by the extra links added to the trophic web in these instances."

On the contrary, he tells us, the "extra links" must inevitably increase instability.

"The greater the size and connectedness of a web the larger the number of oscillations it possesses: since in general each mode is as likely to be stable as unstable, (unless increased complexity is of a highly specialised kind) the addition of more and more modes simply increases the chance for the total web to be unstable."

This absurd argument makes excellent sense if we define 'complexity' as random complexity, calculated purely in terms of the number of randomly chosen and randomly interrelated parts or as a measure of the interrelated entities that display 'random order'.

Mellanby sees this as providing a full justification for the simplification of agricultural ecosystems, Prigogine for the simplification of the biosphere as a whole and for the increased need for man's technological intervention.

But it does nothing of the sort. May [21] himself admits that his argument is only true of mathematical models and that its application is further limited to systems with an even number of species - a disquieting thought, if it were supposed to apply to the real world, but of no particular consequence if it is only to apply to a mathematical model. May's work is based on the mathematical models developed by Lotka and Volterra but, he tells us,

"Whether or not the Lotka or the Volterra equations are applicable to the real world situation is outside the point being made here, which is that complex mathematical models are in general less stable than the correspondingly simple mathematical models with few species."

In the real world, May admits, things may be different.

"Natural ecosystems, whether structurally complex or simple, are the product of a long history of co-evolution of their constituent plants and animals. It is at least plausible that such intricate evolutionary processes have, in effect, brought about those relatively tiny and mathematically atypical regions of parameter space which endow the system with long-term stability." [21]

However, as May states himself, such an ecosystem is "mathematically atypical" and hence, he intimates, of little relevance to a mathematical model. [23]

It is significant that Prigogine, like Mellanby, takes as a justification for his views on the behaviour of natural ecosystems, the work of a writer for whom natural ecosystems are unimportant because they are "mathematically atypical".

In reality of course 'random complexity' is a fiction - just as is 'random order' or a 'random system'.

Complexity is above all organisation. To Prigogine it coincides with organisation - since he does not distinguish between complexity and diversity. [7]

In the real world, as Pittendrigh [22] points out, things only organise themselves for the purpose of achieving a given goal. "There is no such thing as organisation in any absolute sense, pure and simple", he writes, "organisation is always relative and relative to an end." What is more, within the biosphere there is only one overall end. It is adaptation to the environment. Thus "to say that living things are organised is to say they are adaptive."

And "If there is, beneath the great diversity of nature, an underlying similarity of design", Pittendrigh writes, "it is that all living things share the same purpose." (To achieve the goal in an orderly environment of course means developing the appropriate complexity; to achieve it in a disorderly environment requires the development of the appropriate diversity). [7]

If the general design is the same, its details vary from one system to another. What is more, in any such organisation - an ecosystem for instance - each sub-organisation or sub-system has a specific role to fulfil in assuring that the organisation, or system as a whole, achieves its overall goal i.e. its stability.

For this reason the parts of an ecosystem are not interchangeable as they would be if its organisation were random and if it tended towards a random goal. It follows that the only thing that was really increased by the introduction of the Japanese beetle, the European gypsy moth and the Oriental chestnut blight in North America was randomness and disorder, which reduced rather than increased real biospheric complexity and stability.

If the introduction (into an ecosystem) of forms of life, which evolved as the differentiated parts of a very different ecosystem, reduces rather than increases complexity, still more is the complexity of the biosphere as a whole reduced, as we pollute it with fusion reactors, genetically engineered micro-organisms and all the other things that Prigogine refers to misleadingly as "Le Nouvel Etat de Nature".

These are the components of a super-duper technosphere - an organisation of matter that is in direct conflict with the biosphere, from which it derives its resources and to which it consigns its increasingly toxic waste.

Technospheric 'complexity' is thus not only different from biospheric complexity but diametrically opposed to it. The former can only increase at the cost of correspondingly reducing the latter.

It is true, as Prigogine tells us, that the world is becoming ever more complex, also it is becoming correspondingly more unstable. What Prigogine does not tell us, however, is that the increased complexity he refers to is technospheric as opposed to biospheric complexity.

Nor does he tell us that this increased technospheric complexity is being achieved at the cost of correspondingly reducing the complexity of the biosphere nor, of course, that it is to this reduced biospheric complexity that the current instabilities must be attributed.

Structure and process

Jantsch [9] makes use of another expedient for rationalising his idea of perpetual technospheric change. He tells us that "the evolutionary perspective emphasises process over structure, the exchange of energy over its containment, flexibility and change over stability." Elsewhere he tells us that structure "is an incidental product of interrupted processes, no more solid than the grin of a Cheshire cat."

Neither Prigogine nor Jantsch attempt to define 'structure'. In normal language it means organisation and hence complexity (unless of course complexity is distinguished from diversity). Since complexity and diversity are taken to be random, their structure is indeed 'incidental'.

However it is nonsense to talk of processes as being of more importance than the structure with which they are associated. All structures exist in time as well as space, and all processes exist in space as well as in time - so much so that one cannot really distinguish between the two. The fertilised egg that develops into a foetus, and then into a human adult, who ages and eventually dies, can be seen either as a particular structure or as a particular process depending on whether one wishes to accentuate its spatial or its temporal aspect.

If a structure or organisation is random, or 'incidental', then so must be the associated process. This means that 'process' for Jantsch cannot be 'life process' (which is goal directed and highly orderly) but must simply refer to chaotic uncontrolled change - the sort of change that, at a biological level, occurs in cancerous tissue, and, at a social level, in an anonymous mass society that is moving, as is ours, ineluctably towards collapse.

Jantsch9 admits this in so many words. For him a process "does not just seek peace with the world or some action of homeostatic relationship, it acts upon the world and stakes its own claim ... ", although he admits that there may be certain "guidelines" which affect "the overall structure". Elsewhere he tells us that a process "seeks its own way and finds its own justification in itself, not in any external regulator or guarantor". [11,12]

In other words Jantsch's process is in no way subject to biospheric control, which means that it cannot be an integral part of the biosphere (i.e. homeotelic to it). [7] On the contrary, it must be purely random to it.

Stability

Another concept which Prigogine and Jantsch misuse is that of 'stability' which for them is a feature of those 'steady-state non-equilibrium structures', such as planets and crystals, whose behaviour we are told is still governed by Boltzman's Ordering Principle. It is not, on the other hand, a feature of living things, that are classified as 'dissipative structures' and that are brought into being by amplified fluctuations. In their efforts to prove this thesis, Prigogine and Jantsch constantly allude to an article by Holling, a Canadian ecologist, that is worth considering in some detail.

Holling, like Prigogine and Jantsch, sees stability as something that is undesirable. [23] For him stable systems, in which category he includes living things that have not been subjected to change for a very long time, are not persistent and are, for this reason, unsuccessful. Successful systems, like Prigogine's 'dissipative structures', are necessarily unstable and Holling refers to them as 'resilient'.

The first point one must make is that living systems which have remained constant over long periods, are the rule rather than the exception. In fact, the most striking feature of the behaviour of living things during the last 3 billion years is not their ability to change but, on the contrary, their extraordinary constancy. Many forms of live have not changed at all for hundreds of millions of years, a fact that is difficult to explain in terms of current evolutionary theory. Thorp refers to it "as the problem of fixity in evolution". He asks,

"What is it that helps so many groups of animals to maintain an astonishingly constant form over millions of years? This seems to me to be the problem now - the problem of constancy rather than of change ... These problems seem to me to stick out like a sore thumb in modern evolutionary theory." [24]

Both Huxley and Waddington have been struck by the same dilemma. Darwin himself, as already mentioned [7], stated in a letter to Lyell, that if he had to start again, rather than use the term 'natural selection' he would use 'natural preservation'. [25]

There is another objection to Holling's thesis. For him a stable system is one that is capable of returning to an 'equilibrium state' after a temporary disturbance and "the more rapidly it returns and with the least fluctuation, the more stable it is." In other words he regards a stable living system as 'homeostatic' and its behaviour as similar to that of a thermostat which assures the constant temperature of, say, a centrally heated apartment by bringing it back to a pre-determined norm after a temporary diversion.

As usual, a comparison between the behaviour of machines and living things is misleading, for the experience of the thermostat is reversible (so long as we ignore the minute effects of wear and tear), while among living things, as both Prigogine and Jantsch themselves point out, time and experience are irreversible. [7] They are thus being most inconsistent when they adopt, with Holling, a definition of stability that assumes the reversibility of time and experience.

In reality, living things do not react to a disturbance by returning to a pre-disturbance state. Every disturbance, however temporary, must affect them, if only to assure that when it recurs, they are better capable of dealing with it, so that it gives rise to a smaller fluctuation.

In other words, natural systems learn and this means that they can maintain their stability in a constantly changing environment in which machines would rapidly become unstable.

Living things must thereby be seen as dynamic rather than static, and stability, instead of being a point in space-time towards which they tend, must be regarded as a course along which they must move in order to minimise change i.e. so as to achieve a climax state (see the Second Law of Ecodynamics). [7] When this state has been achieved, stable systems will continue to change, but at a very reduced rate, as the climax is the most stable (and hence the most desirable) state and all but minimal further change cease to be necessary.

Waddington [29] refers to such a course as the "chreod" (from the Greek chre - it is fated or necessary and Hodos - a path) though he does not describe it in the technological language I make use of. The nature of the 'chreod' that a system must adopt is determined by the instructions it contains in its genes and other organisations of information, in interaction with the environment within which it travels, which Waddington refers to as the "epigenetic landscape".

Living systems, rather than display homeostasis, he sees as displaying homeorhesis (from the Greek homeo- same, rheo - flow). To quote Waddington,

"We use the word 'homeorhesis' when what is stabilized is not a constant value but is a particular course of change in time. If something happens to alter a homeorhetic system and control mechanisms do not bring it back to where it was at the time the alteration occurred, but bring it back to where it would normally have got to at some later time." [29]

As a living system moves along its chreod, it is constantly subjected to fluctuations, the size of which must of course vary. Thus the behaviour of a system functioning in a highly orderly environment (such as that which exists within our bodies) will be characterised by small fluctuations; that of systems functioning in a disorderly environment, by much larger fluctuations.

The former will resemble, up to a point, what Holling refers to as stable behaviour, though not exactly. Our body's internal environment is not immobile - it consists of innumerable processes that have moved along the 'chreod' corresponding to our optimum embryological and ontogenetic development. The latter behaviour, that which occurs within a disorderly environment, is characterised by large fluctuations and is, thereby, what Holling regards as 'resilient.'

The distinction between the two, however, is not as critical as Holling makes out for the goal of both types of behaviour is the same: to maintain stability in the face of change. Of course, in the latter case, the change is greater than in the former, which means that the strategy required to achieve the goal is somewhat different. However, to say that the former system is stable and the latter unstable is simply nonsense. As Waddington [29] writes, Holling's distinction between stability and resilience is simply based "on a confusion between two different types of stability."

It is true that those highly integrated systems whose behaviour is subjected to smaller fluctuations (and thereby correspond most closely to those that Holling regards as stable) have become so specialised, and hence so committed to a very specific environment, that they are correspondingly vulnerable to unexpected environmental changes.

This does not mean, however, that they are 'inpersistent' and hence 'unsuccessful'. If they were not highly persistent and highly successful, there would be no biological organisms on this planet - since the systems that make up their internal environment all fall within this category. It does mean, however, that such systems must be insulated in some way from the rigours of the external environment. If nature did not provide such insulation, then Holling would be right but in all but the most aberrant man-made conditions, nature always obliges.

The centralisation of our nervous system and the development of the neo-cortex enables us, for instance, to deal with environmental challenges and hence to insulate our internal environment. But in addition, further insulation is provided by the family, whose own internal environment is further insulated by the community of which it is part. Less highly perfected ecological mechanisms also exist to insulate all sorts of primitive forms of life that have not changed over long periods from radical environmental challenges.

As we move from the internal environment of an organism to that of the family and the community, so is behaviour increasingly 'resilient', to use Holling's term, i.e. it is characterised by larger fluctuations. It is not very helpful to say that this resilience is more desirable than the less resilient behaviour that occurs within the organism since the function of behaviour within the community is above all, as we have seen, to insulate the behaviour which occurs within the family and the organism from external challenges, i.e. to help maintain their stability.

In addition, if external conditions become too challenging, it is the larger, more resilient systems that first collapse, not the smaller, more 'stable' ones (in Holling's terminology) as the history of the progressive breakdown of our society clearly reveals. So Holling has got it all wrong.

There is however a critical distinction to make. It is not between systems displaying small fluctuations and those that display large fluctuations, but between those whose behaviour is characterised by constant or decreasing fluctuations and those whose behaviour is characterised by growing fluctuations.

The former we can regard as stable the latter as unstable. In the former case, fluctuations are under control, the system being capable of dealing with the challenges of its environment, in the latter case, they are out of control i.e. the challenges are of a sort that the system cannot deal with adaptively. Such systems are, of course, condemned to disintegration and extinction.

Holling regards the ideal system, the one with the appropriate resilience and persistence, as falling within the former category i.e. as being subjected to big -though not necessarily increasing - fluctuations. Such a system in my language (also Waddington's) is stable. Prigogine and Jantsch, on the other hand, sing the praises of systems with growing fluctuations i.e. unstable systems.

For this reason Holling's argument, even if it were valid, would only very superficially support the Prigogine paradigm.

There are no laws

If behaviour is random, then it is not governed by any precise laws. This, Prigogine and Jantsch explicitly accept. Being Aristo-scientists, by 'laws', they mean the 'laws' of physics and thermodynamics. In fact, for Prigogine, the only universal laws are those of classical thermodynamics. But these only apply to those things that are 'near thermodynamic equilibrium' i.e. that are in a state of homogeneity. To quote him,

"Les seules lois macroscopiques universelles sont bien les lois qui decrivent l'évolution vers le dèsordre, vers les états déquilibre ou les états stationnaires proches de l'équilibre mais ces lois physiques ne constituent pas le context par rapport auquel le vivant doit se definir: non pas parce qu'il est vivant mais parce que, physiquement, il ne remplit pas les conditions d'application de ces lois, les conditions sous lesquelles ces lois sont pertinentes." [10]

In other words, since living things do not fall within this category, the laws of classical thermodynamics cannot apply to them, and since there are no other laws, it must follow that the behaviour of living things is not subjected to any laws at all. All this sounds very much like the worst type of Mediaeval casuistry. Yet Prigogine assures us that it is the only possible position that a scientist can adopt, for it is the only one that is reconcilable with the statistical theory which is so fundamental to modern science. As Needham assures us, laws are but words we give to statistical regularities,

"valables uniquement pour des temps et des lieux donnes, en termes de description et non de prescription." [26]

When the Newtonian paradigm was in fashion, Prigogine admits, there were indeed Laws. However it was by specifically rejecting the notion that nature was governed by laws that it became possible to free science from the 'Newtonian myth'. As Prigogine tells us,

"La Science échappe au mythe Newtonien parce qu'elle a conclue théoriquement a l'impossibilite de reduire la nature a la simplicité cachée d'une réalité régie par des lois universelles." [10]

Morin, who is deeply steeped in the Prigogine mythology, tells us that it is only in "popular epistemology" that one finds reference today to the laws of nature. In other words only the stupid and the uneducated still believe that nature is governed by laws. [27] Modern science has abolished them all and has thereby liberated man so that he is now free to create his own laws, to determine the course of his own evolution, and hence his own destiny. This is the essence of Jantsch's message in The Self-Organising Universe, in which he assures us,

"Evolution is basically open. It determines its own dynamics and direction. This dynamic unfolds in a systemic web which, in particular, is characterised by the co-evolution of macro and micro systems. By way of this dynamic interconnectedness, evolution also determines its own meaning."

In reality of course nature is bound by a very large number of different laws. What is more they are very much more than 'statistical regularities' and they are 'prescriptive' too.

As Waddington points out, laws are best seen as constraints. [28] Among other things, the term constraint is only meaningful in a teleological context i.e. as a constraint that must be observed in order to achieve a specific goal. Since living things, as already seen, tend towards the same goal, it must follow that, at a certain level of generality, they also tend to be governed by the same constraints or laws.

These laws are not binding in an absolute sense of the term - it is this that confuses our Aristo-scientists - but if they are not observed then the systems bound by the law will not achieve their goal. They will become unstable and hence fail to survive.

Thus men can walk over cliffs, refrain from eating and drink cups full of cyanide - but if they do this they will not be around for too long. Similarly, the general laws governing the behaviour of biological, social and ecological systems are those that must be observed, if these organisations are to remain stable and hence survive.

The systems that make up the biosphere are thus 'prescriptive', contrary to what Needham tells us -prescriptive for the achievement of their goal and hence for the achievement of biospheric stability.

Once more, however, this is not apparent to scientists who deny the validity of such key concepts as 'organisation' and 'teleology' without which one cannot understand the world of living things.

Malleability

We have seen that, in order to rationalise the desirability of perpetual technospheric change, Prigogine and Jantsch have tried to show that, within the biosphere, units of behaviour or systems are of a purely random nature; that stability is self-defeating; that 'structure' is random too and also of little importance, no more so than the "grin on the face of a Cheshire cat"; that only 'process' is important -though it is also random and hence subject to no laws.

In other words, the world of living things is infinitely malleable. Anything goes.

Prigogine and Jantsch are not the first to have tried to justify the transformation of the world of living things under the influence of development by an appeal to the infinite malleability of man and nature. Lemarck tried to do so. It was his principal error. He assumed that man could adapt genetically to short-term environmental changes which meant that he could constantly undergo radical structural and behavioural changes, which of course, it is precisely the goal of behaviour in the natural world to prevent. Lemarck, as Piaget puts it, compared

"L'organisation héréditaire à un liquide épousant les formes de tous les récipients sans stabilité ni même, en principe, sans l'irréversibilité de nature historique." [29]

Instead, as we know, the hereditary material is relatively non-plastic, unmmodifiable by the short-term experience of a species - though almost certainly not, as neo-Darwinists imply, by its long-term experience.

Those who wish to justify the radical way in which social structures are being transformed by the industrial process, must try to persuade themselves, against all the evidence, that social structures are even more malleable than are biological ones. As Ellul writes

"On souhaite en réalite (même si cela n'est pas clairement exprimé) une organisation sociale parfaitment malleable : car la technique pour progreser éxige une grande mobilité sociale puisqu'il faut des déplacements considerables de population, des mutations dans l'exercise des professions, des changements de qualification sociale, des affectations de resources et des modifications de structure des groupes." [30]

Most modern historians and sociologists also see society in this way. H. A. L. Fisher, for instance, tells us that man does not have a nature, only a history - intimating, thereby, that human behaviour is infinitely malleable, that the course of history, as a result, is no more than random change.

Edward 0. Wilson also talks of the "extreme plasticity of social behaviour", [31] implying that we can adapt to living in just about any social environment, including of course, that which the industrial process imposes upon us - an environment composed of a structureless and anonymous mass of alienated individuals, one that could not differ more radically from that to which we have been adapted by our evolution.

The opposite of course is true. Like all living things, we are capable of adaptive behaviour because our biological and social structure, rather than being random and hence malleable, is on the contrary highly specific. The behaviour associated with it is very specific, governed by a very specific set of laws. It is goal-directed but the goal rather than the perpetual change is, on the contrary, the maintenance of stability i.e. the preservation of both our own basic structure and that of a very specific social and physical environment which must closely resemble that to which we have been adapted by our evolution.

To say that it is adaptive means that it can correct superficial divergences from this ideal environment but not more profound ones, such as those imposed by development and industrialisation and in particular by the super-star technologies that Prigogine and Jantsch propose - and which can only lead to the annihilation of complex forms of life on this planet.

The self-organising Universe

Jantsch's universe like Prigogine's is above all a self-organising one. At the same time, both of them insist that the evolutionary process is a man-made one. Prigogine tells Salomon, if we remember, that it is only by means of high technology, the development of thermonuclear fusion, genetic engineering and the building of colonies in space that we can solve our problems. How can they reconcile these two apparently irreconcilable positions?

There is only one way in which it can be done. It is to identify man with the Universe. If Prigogine and Jantsch can succeed in doing this (and they have performed other equally impressive feats of intellectual acrobatics), then the universe can be seen once more as self-organising. But how can their disciples be persuaded that man and the universe are one? Again there is a well-established expedient that can be exploited for this purpose. It consists in de-sanctifying nature and then, by attributing to man some key super-natural faculty that no other living things possess, to sanctify him in its stead.

In this way, our theologians have insisted that only man possesses a soul, a new idea since, when nature, too, was regarded as holy, all living creatures were also assumed to possess souls.

With the rise of rationalism in Europe came the notion that only man was capable of 'rational' behaviour, the behaviour of non-human animals being guided by blind-instinct alone.

For Prigogine and Jantsch, man's holiness is bound up in his possession of a mind and hence of consciousness. Consciousness for Prigogine and Jantsch represents the highest state of evolution, as in the Noosphere of Teilhard du Chardin. Once this stage is achieved, the whole universe can be identified with consciousness and it is this consciousness that determines the course of further evolution.

It is because man possesses consciousness, Jantsch tells us that "mankind is not redeemed by God but redeems itself".

The evolution of consciousness then becomes synonymous with the evolution of the Universe. To quote Jantsch,

"Natural history including the history of man, may not be understood as the history of the organisation of matter and energy. But it may also be viewed as the organisation of information into complexity or knowledge. Above all however, it may be understood as the evolution of consciousness, or in other words, of autonomy and emancipation - and as the evolution of the mind ... Mind appears now as self-organisation dynamics at many levels, as a dynamic which itself evolves. In this respect, all natural history is also history of mind. Self-transcendence~ the evolutionary processes, is this evolution of the mind."

If we are to attain Jantsch's mystical paradise, it is because the human consciousness is moving us in this direction, via the ever greater fluctuations that it engenders. To subject these fluctuations to any biological, ecological and social constraints would be to divert us from this optimum course and hence to deprive us of all the delectable dissipative structures that otherwise lie in wait for us.

For this reason man's every conscious whim, caprice and self-indulgence must be immediately satisfied, in particular those that involve the introduction of the super-star technologies that Prigogine and Jantsch so strongly favour, regardless of the biological, social and ecological destruction that their introduction must inevitably bring about.

This provides the ultimate rationalisation of individualism, egoism and irresponsibility - the invisible hand gone berserk. Not only is it now seen as assuring our material prosperity but of determining too the very functioning, and hence the evolution of the biosphere itself.

The New Ecology

Surprisingly enough, both Prigogine and Jantsch regard their message as highly ecological. They see consciousness-made evolution or the further 'self-organisation' of the universe as leading to a 'new alliance' between man and nature.

Monod, let us remember, told us that the evolution of man cannot be deduced from basic physical and thermodynamic laws. [10] Since there are no other laws, man must be the product of pure chance. This meant that the old pre-scientific alliance between man and nature could no longer be justified. Man is isolated, Monod tells us, in a world in which he is but a stranger.

Prigogine called his most famous book La Nouvelle Alliance. It was basically an answer to Monod. Its thesis was that the new non-linear thermodynamics, which he had invented, had brought man back once more into contact with nature. Man, for him, is not the product of chance, as Monod told us, for his occurrence is at least consistent with non-linear thermodynamics which explains how the dissipation of the sun's energy gives rise to dissipative structures of which man is the most highly perfected example.

What is more, once we have all become genetic engineers, so must we become correspondingly more integrated into this world of living things. To Prigogine, genetic engineering is a highly ecological activity, even a 'poetic' one:

"Notre science occupe la position singulière d'écoute poètique de la nature - au sens étymologique où le poète est un fabricant - exploration active, manipulatrice et calculatrice mais désormais capable de respecter la nature qu'elle fait parler." [10]

Jantsch goes still further. The 'new alliance' that Prigogine has discovered gives new meaning to life. It provides a new sense of connectedness and

"this connectedness of our own life processes with the dynamics of an all embracing universe has so far been accessible only too mystic experience. In the synthesis, it becomes part of science which in this way comes closer to life."

So we have a new ecology. Eugene Odum and Paul Ehrlich take heed: the study of a poetic and mystical self-organising universe, brimful of genetically engineered dissipative structures, brought into being by consciousness-assisted randomly amplified fluctuations. God help us.

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