BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

ADAPTIVE SHIFT 1)

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A process in a population through which individuals resistant to some destructive factor become gradually more numerous, while non-resistant individuals are eliminated.

This process had been observed already in the 19th century, for instance in a moth living on the bark of birches in England, adapting to the blackening of the colour of the bark due to industrial pollution and as a result of selection pressure exerted by predator birds.

The danger to produce similar side-effects by the use of insecticides or antibiotics, was signaled as early as 1953, but not heeded. Adaptive shifts have now produced the appearance of resistant populations of many insects and pathogens. The lesson has however not yet been learned, as shown for example by the dubious use of genetic engineering to create selective resistance to chemical killers in cultivated plants with the hope to selectively kill weeds, which supposedly could not acquire such resistance.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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