The Organism and the Open System: Ervin Bauer and Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this historical treatise two biological-system theories, formulated in the 1920s and 1930s, are roughly sketched. The first part discusses the concept of a thermodynamically open system, as coined by the Russian pathologist Ervin Bauer (1890-1942). Like Bertalanffy, Bauer wanted to prove the specificity of the biological sciences against physics. To achieve this, he postulated the necessity to formulate specific laws of motion which are valid for living matter alone. In the second part of the paper, the organismic-system theory of the Austrian-Canadian philosopher and biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972) is outlined. The focus of this theory relied on the process dynamics that is inherent inside an organismic system. Both theories exemplify closure models for a living organism from a methodical point of view that distinguishes these earlier models from semantic closure, developed by Howard Pattee as an epistemic clue in solving the enigma of living phenomena. The objective here is to disclose the essential differences between these closure conceptions. To encourage further research on closure, the essay concludes with a few questions concerning clarification of the term.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".