An Approach to Cybernetics

Approach To complete the picture, there is Rashevsky's2G view of evolution. The organism, regarded as a control system, can be mapped on to an image wherein all metrical properties are discarded, but all 'structural' relations preserved. The image will be a graph of the kind we used to depict states, only, in this case, the nodal points represent biological properties such as 'feeding' and 'secretion'. Rashevsky contends that the various graphs which have arisen by evolution can be transformed into one another which is incontravertible if we accept the regularity of the real world and are derivable from a primordial graph by repeated application, representing stages in evolution, of a single topological transformation T, some parameters of which are variable. For reasonable choice of T the primordial graph is a homomorph of any later graph and it is possible to 'work backwards'. Now T