International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

St. BEER writes some curious and stimulating reflexions about growth: "…any organic seminal programme that inaugurates and controls growth 'knows when to stop'. This capability applies not only to the macrostructure, so that you and I are roughly the right size to be recognizably human: it also applies to the infrastructure of the organism: every limb, every organ, every parcel of tissue however delineated, from cranium to toe-nail, grows to a limit. During growth, further growth is by definition due to follow: development (except by massive intervention from outside) cannot be arrested until the plan is complete. To this extent, a partly grown organism is in an improbable state, and is driving towards its most probable state – adult completion. Growth can be regarded, that is to say, as an entropic process. The growth process stops when the genetic information is used up, actually having been finally and in sum exchanged for potentiality… Growth, then, is a self organized activity of a system in which that system 'learns to be what it is'" (1968, p.360-1).

In other words:

1. Growth is within each individual system the actualization process of an archetypical algorithm.

2. Growth leads inevitably to organizational closure and autopoiesis.

3. It leads as well to mature homeostasis, i.e. dynamic stability.

4. The original archetypical "seed" must contain an implicit potential (whatever this may mean) for constraints construction, probably operated through interactions and connections between its original elements.

5. It must contain coordinated loops of self-reference which guide the system along a typical chreod.