Module 2

• System


  Consisting of three kinds of things: elements or structures, interconnections or interactions that hold the elements together, and a function or purpose that produce their own pattern or behavior over time
• Biological principles play an important role in understanding the living systems that encompass all the microorganisms, plants, and animals including our own human race
• Law of specialization


  The more highly adapted an organism is to a specific environment, the more difficult it is for the organism to adapt to a different environment
• It is important to understand the fundamentals of systems thinking to help us build and sustain stable, reliable systems that will function well in the complex society where we belong
• When a living creature dies, it loses its "system-ness" and the multiple interrelations that held it together no longer function, and it dissipates, although its material remains part of a larger food-web system
• Any other system for that matter will collapse or lose its system-ness when all the parts are gone or are no longer functioning
• Living systems


  • Organized into hierarchies with progressive specialization of functions and complexity emerging from lower level to higher levels of organization
  • Open systems with purposes and goals
• Eleven ecological levels-of-organization hierarchy

  • Cell
  • Tissue
  • Organ
  • Organism
  • Population
  • Community
  • Ecosystem
  • Biosphere

  
• There are seven basic functions (also known as transcending factors) that operate at all levels including energetics, behavior, development, evolution, diversity, integration, and regulation
• Energetics


  Study involving energy and matter conversion
• Negative feedback


  An increase in the population of grazers will exert an increase in grazing pressures on plants, leading to the decrease in the quality and quantity of the plants that eventually causes starvation and decrease in the population of grazers to alleviate the grazing pressure
• Positive feedback


  Grazing becomes unregulated because the humans who own these grazers get a reward or profit by increasing the number of grazers, leading to the collapse of the system
• The natural system with its self-organizing capacity will persist without humans, but humans cannot live without it