ABSTRACT
Since its inception in the 1940s, cybernetics held the promise of providing a general theory of communication. Norbert Wiener (1948) defined cybernetics as the “science of control and communication,” and, to emphasize the irrelevance of the nature (or materiality) of the communicators involved and to distinguish it from entirely social conceptions,Wiener added “in the animal and the machine” to it. Early successes of cybernetics were technical, for example the design of automatic controllers, computers, telecommunication systems, and information networks. However, theoretical developments surpassed this initial focus; examples with far-reaching implications are theories of information flows in complex systems, theories of selforganization, N-person game theories, theories of equilibria and homeostasis in systems, theories of positive and negative feedback, and theories of morphogenesis, all of which formalized general ideas. Consequently,Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Stafford Beer, Karl Deutsch, Gregory Bateson, George Spencer-Brown, Francisco Varela, and many others derived profound insights from cybernetics, applying them to neurophysiology, cognition, anthropology, religion, industrial organization, government, psychology, logic, and biology.W. Ross Ashby (1956a) captured the power of cybernetics to organize knowledge in these diverse fields with an analogy: cybernetics is to real systems as geometry is to the earth’s surface.
