Tag Archives: ecosystems

Re-engineering engineering

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More than a decade ago, when I was a Department Head for Mechanical Engineering, people used to ask me ‘What is Mechanical Engineering?’.  My answer was that mechanical engineering is about utilising the material and energy resources available in nature to deliver goods and services demanded by society – that’s a broad definition.  And, mechanical engineering is perhaps the broadest engineering discipline, which has enable mechanical engineers to find employment in a wide spectrum areas from aerospace, through agricultural, automotive and biomedical to nuclear and solar energy engineering.  Many of these areas of engineering have become very specialised with their proponents believing that they have a unique set of constraints which demand the development of special techniques and accompanying language or terminology.  In some ways, these specialisms are like the historic guilds in Europe that jealously guarded their knowledge and skills; indeed there are more than 30 licensed engineering institutions in the UK.

In an age where information is readily available [see my post entitled ‘Wanted: user experience designers‘ on July 5th, 2017], the role of engineers is changing and they ‘are integrators who pull ideas together from multiple streams of knowledge’ [to quote Jim Plummer, former Dean of Engineering at Stanford University in ‘Think like an engineer‘ by Guru Madhaven].  This implies that engineers need to be able work with a wide spectrum of knowledge rather than being embedded in a single specialism; and, since many of the challenges facing our global society involve complex systems combining engineering, environmental and societal components, engineering education needs to include gaining an understanding of ecosystems and the subtleties of human behaviour as well as the fundamentals of engineering.  If we can shift our engineering degrees away from specialisms towards this type of systems thinking then engineering is likely to enormously boost its contribution to our society and at the same time the increased relevance of the degree programmes might attract a more diverse student population which will promote a better fit of engineering solutions to the needs of our whole of global society [see also ‘Where science meets society‘ on September 2nd 2015).

For information on the licensed engineering institutions in the UK see: https://www.engc.org.uk/about-us/our-partners/professional-engineering-institutions/

No closed systems in nature

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WP_20150722_008 (2)While I was away on vacation last month, WordPress sent an email congratulating me on the third anniversary of the start of this blog.  This stimulated me to look at the statistics on the most frequently read, or at least viewed, of the approximately 160 postings that I have written.  Top of the list is an early posting which asks the question ‘Are there any closed systems in nature?’ (see post entitled ‘Closed systems in Nature?’ on December 21st, 2012).  Since this question has generated more interest than any of my subsequent postings, it seems appropriate, after 30 months, to attempt an answer.

Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928), and independently Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972), recognized that all living systems are open systems in the thermodynamic sense, which operate far-from equilibrium and require a continual flux of matter and energy to sustain life.  By contrast, closed thermodynamic systems tend to settle into a state of equilibrium, i.e. with no differences in energy, no chemical reactions in progress and no unbalanced forces.

The cybernetist, William Ross Ashby (1903-1972) suggested that living systems are energetically open but operationally closed, i.e. closed to information and control.  In other words, a cell, or any other living organism, needs no information from the environment to be itself. All the information for a bee to be a bee is contained inside a bee (for more on the bee theme see ‘Entropy management for bees and flights‘ on November 5th, 2014 and ‘Fields of flowers’ on July 8th, 2015).  These concepts, of being energetically open and operationally closed, form the essence of the characteristics of biological life as described by Capra and Luisi, whom I have loosely quoted in the previous sentence.

So, to answer my original question, there are no closed living systems in nature.  We can take this a step further: in 1927  Charles Elton defined an ecosystem in terms of the flow of energy and matter from one organism to another. Consequently, the only waste generated by an ecosystem as a whole is the entropy associated with respiration, which allows the system to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics, and the waste is replaced with energy from the sun through photosynthesis.  The sum of all ecosystems is the biosphere.  So, it can be construed that everything on Earth is part of one giant open system – this is essentially the Gaia hypothesis.

Sources:

Gorelik, G., Principal ideas of Bogdanov’s tektology: the universal science of organisation, General Systems, 20:3-13, 1975.

Bertalanffy, L. von, General Systems Theory, New York: Braziller, 1968.

Ashby, W.R., Design for a Brain, New York: Wiley, 1952.

Capra, F., Luisi, P.L., The Systems View of Life – A unifying vision, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Elton, C.S, Animal Ecology, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1927 (reprinted 2001, University of Chicago Press).

Lovelock, J., Gaia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.