Systems view of life 🌐

Panarchy of Adaptive Cycles, adapted and expanded from Gunderson & Holling (2001)

“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”

—Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize-winning chemist

We call it ‘Cake Rocket Child’ because the original version, which the below is adapted from, compared the characteristics of three different types of problems (simple, complicated, and complex) with three examples:

• baking a cake (simple problem)

• sending a rocket to the moon (complicated problem)

• raising a child (complex problem)

Adaptive Cycle

This is water. By David Foster Wallace.