Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword by Ernest Naylor
- Preface: ‘A fragment of a possible world’
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Growth unlimited: blooms, swarms and plagues
- 3 Self-regulating systems: from machines to humans
- 4 The wealth of homeodynamic responses
- 5 A cybernetic approach to growth analysis
- 6 A control mechanism for Maia
- 7 The three levels of adaptation
- 8 Population growth and its control
- 9 Hierarchy: a controlled harmony
- 10 History of hormesis and links to homeopathy
- 11 Maian mechanisms for hormesis and catch-up growth
- 12 Cellular growth control and cancer
- 13 Human overpopulation
- 14 Our finite Earth
- 15 The Maia hypothesis and anagenesis
- Glossary
- Further reading
- References
- Index
2 - Growth unlimited: blooms, swarms and plagues
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword by Ernest Naylor
- Preface: ‘A fragment of a possible world’
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Growth unlimited: blooms, swarms and plagues
- 3 Self-regulating systems: from machines to humans
- 4 The wealth of homeodynamic responses
- 5 A cybernetic approach to growth analysis
- 6 A control mechanism for Maia
- 7 The three levels of adaptation
- 8 Population growth and its control
- 9 Hierarchy: a controlled harmony
- 10 History of hormesis and links to homeopathy
- 11 Maian mechanisms for hormesis and catch-up growth
- 12 Cellular growth control and cancer
- 13 Human overpopulation
- 14 Our finite Earth
- 15 The Maia hypothesis and anagenesis
- Glossary
- Further reading
- References
- Index
Summary
In taking a view of animated nature, we cannot fail to be struck with a prodigious power of increase in plants and animals.
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.
Thomas Malthus (1766–1834)If in successive time intervals of the same length a number doubles itself by the same factor, we have an example of exponential growth. Self-reproduction or autocatalysis underlies this law. The quantity at hand – whether we are dealing with neutrons in a block of uranium, bacteria in a culture, people, capital, information or knowledge – will catalyse, program and regulate its own reproduction.
Manfred Eigen and Ruthild WinklerTHE GROWTH OF MICROALGAL POPULATIONS
In 1868 the Victorian scientist Thomas H. Huxley (1825–1895) gave a lecture to the working men of Norwich On a piece of chalk. He first described the size of the chalk deposits, stretching from Flamborough Head to Lulworth Cove, which is 280 miles as the crow flies. But these are merely the western extremity of the Cretaceous chalk deposits laid down some 140 million years ago, and extending 3,000 miles across Europe. Having convinced his audience of the scale of the geological chalk strata beneath their feet, he then teased them as to whether they might know their origins.
Huxley described how he had looked at thin slices of chalk under the microscope and found innumerable fossilised remains of marine organisms. He likened the calcareous shells of Foraminifera of the genus Globigerina (single-celled organisms with globular chambers and shells) to ‘a badly grown raspberry’.
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- Information
- A Cybernetic View of Biological GrowthThe Maia Hypothesis, pp. 17 - 40Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010