View source for Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy

Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy was an Austrian-born biologist who is credited with founding [[General Systems Theory]].

==A Systems Theory in Biology==
Bertalanffy studied philosophy at the University of Vienna, under the neo-kantian philosopher Robert Reininger, and Moritz Schlick, the founder of the Viennese Circle. Bertalanffy also followed closely the development of biological theories at the Viennese Prater Vivarium laboratory, which profoundly influenced his work. Bertalanffy's contribution can thus be seen as the establishment of a philosophical foundation for the theory of systems that was elaborated by the experimental biologists at the Prater Vivarium laboratory.

The biological theory of systems was in particular developed by experimental biologist Paul Weiss of the Prater Vivarium. While working on his PhD thesis (published in 1922), Weiss found that his experimental results were incompatible with the prevailing mechanistic concepts dominating biology, which held that activities in life could be explained by physics and chemistry alone without further requirements (a point of view called "reductionism"). In studying phases in the development of the phenotype, Weiss understood the body plan as a product of increasing networking between interacting and developing systems, rather than as a product of the sort of mysterious organizing power postulated by Hans Driesch in his so-called "vitalism." (However, it was Driesch himself who had first referred to developing organisms as 'systems', as early as 1899.) In a book written in 1925, Weiss already conceived of a hierarchical order necessary for the actions of an animal as a whole, built up of levels: physical or chemical reaction, single muscle fiber contraction, contraction of the whole muscle, movement of an organ, motion of the organism. At each level new characteristics appear that cannot be described simply by the lower levels alone. Weiss wrote: "As a system we want to define each complex that, when parts of it are modified, displays an effort to stay constant with regard to its outside."

When he was still a student, Bertalanffy met Weiss, and they discussed these biological concepts. In 1926 Bertalanffy finished his PhD thesis about the German physicist and psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner, who held that the organisation of parts within the living organism forms higher units which actually integrate the organism. Bertalanffy asked whether such questions could be methodically investigated in an abstract manner, and whether they could be empirically verified. In 1928 he published his first book on theoretical biology, Modern Theories of Development, in which he reviewed the question of whether the categories of biology can be reduced to the categories of physics (reductionism). His proposed solution to this question was the organismic system theory, assigning to biological systems a self-organizational dynamics, a theory which was probably based on the work of Weiss, although Bertalanffy failed to give the latter credit for it.

Bertalanffy was convinced that biology's right to exist as a science required a theoretical background which remained to be established, and he thought this could be done with the aid of the organismic system theory. This theory should experimentally investigate how pattern formation functions. To this end, Bertalanffy developed the kinetic theory of open systems, the characteristics of which are equifinality and steady state. 

Von Bertalanffy then wrote first volume of a general treatise on biology, Theoretische Biologie (1932), on the basis of which he was habilitated to became professor at the University of Vienna. In this volume he postulated two essential aims of a theoretical biology, firstly to clean up the conceptual terminology, and, secondly, to explain how the phenomena of life can spontaneously emerge from forces existing inside an organism (that is, how living systems however overcome the principle of entropy by setting up a dynamics of self-organisation). To explain this, he modelled the heuristic fiction of the organism as an open system, interacting with its environment and striving towards a steady state, and postulated two basic principles: the maintenance of the organism in the non-equilibrium, and the hierarchic organization of a systemic structure. He also furnished this biological system theory with a research program that dealt with the quantitative kinetics of growth and metabolism. 

In 1934 von Bertanlanffy published the von Bertalanffy model of growth of an individual organism, which is widely used in biological models. In its simplest form the model is expressed as a differential equation of length (L) over time (t), using a constant r called the von Bertalanffy growth rate.

==The Development of General Systems Theory==
From 1937 to 1938 Bertalanffy was invited as a Rockefeller Fellow to the University of Chicago, where he gave his first lecture about the General System Theory as a methodology that could be valid for all sciences. However, he first article on this subject was published only twelve years later in 1949.

He attempted to stay in United States, but his request was considered less urgent that of the many political refugees, so he returned to Austria, where he was appointed extraordinary professor at the University of Vienna in 1939. There he concentrated his research on a comparative physiology of growth, being the first biologist to give an integrated course on both botany and zoology. In 1940 he published the second volume of his Theoretische Biologie, which developed the research program of a dynamic morphology and applied the mathematical method to biological problems. In 1945 he published the "Zu einer allgemeinen Systemlehre," setting out the basis of General System Theory (GST). 

He was then professor at the University of London in 1948-1949, before emigrating to Canada in 1949. As professor at the University of Ottawa (1950-1954) he mainly worked on metabolism, growth, biophysics, and cancer cytology. In his biomedical research on cancer he developed, with his son Felix, the Bertalanffy-method of cancer cytodiagnosis. From the 1950’s onwards he shifted his research from the biological sciences to the methodology of science, General System Theory (GST), and cognitive psychology.

He taught at the University of Southern California (1955–58), and in 1960 was appointed Professor for Theoretical Biology of the Department of Zoology and Psychology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. There Bertalanffy participated in the establishment of the Advanced Center for Theoretical Psychology, which became a center for cognitive psychology over the next 30 years.

Bertalanffy published an overall synthesis of his theory in a book called General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications, published in 1968. As a methodology applicable to all sciences, GST encompasses the cybernetic theory of feedback that represents a special class of self-regulating systems. But according to Bertalanffy, there exists a fundamental difference between GST and cybernetics, since feedback mechanisms are controlled by constraints whilst dynamical systems show the free interplay of forces. Bertalanffy also believed that general systems concepts were applicable in the social sciences, although he recognised the difficulty of such application, due to the complexity of the intersections between natural sciences and human social systems. However, Bertalanffy's GST remains a bridge for interdisciplinary study of systems in areas such as sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, and psychology.

After his retirement from the Univerity of Alberta, he became a Professor of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the State University of New York (SUNY) until his death in 1972.

==References and Links==
*Wikipedia article on Bertalanffy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Bertalanffy
*http://www.isss.org/lumLVB.htm
*http://isss.org/projects/ludwig_von_bertalanffy
*Is Paul Weiss' and Ludwig von Bertalanffy's System Thinking still valid today? Manfred Drack 1 and Wilfried Apfalter 2
*David Pouvreau, La tragédie dialectique du concept de totalité, Une biographie non officielle de Ludge von Bertalanffy (1901-1972)

[[Category:Post-War Cybernetics]]