The Web Of Life

The Web of Life
Fritjof Capra
Schr o ding er L ectur e, Dublin, Se pt emb e r 9th 1997
Fritjof Capra, Ph.D., physicist and systems theorist, is a founding director of
the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California. He is the author of three
international bestsellers, The Tau of Physics, The Turning Point, and
Uncommon Wisdom. His new book, The Web of Life, was published in October1996.
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Introduction
Emergence of systems thinking
Characteristics of systems thinking
Classical systems theories
The new mathematics of complexity
A new synthesis
Dissipative structures
Autopoiesis
Cognition - the process of life

Introduction
In February 1943, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, one of the
founders of quantum theory, gave a series ofthree lectures at Trinity College
in Dublin with the title "What is Life?". These lectures changed the course of
the life sciences. In the lectures, and in the subsequent book with the same
title, Schrödinger advanced clear and compelling hypotheses about the
molecular structure of genes, which stimulated biologists to think about
genetics in a novel way, and in so doing opened a new frontier ofscience,
molecular biology.
Molecular biologists have discovered the fundamental building blocks of life,
but this has not helped them to understand the vital integrative actions of
living organisms. Twenty-five years ago, one of the leading molecular
biologists, Sidney Brenner, made the following reflective comments:
In one way, you could say all the genetic and molecular biological workof the
last sixty years could be considered a long interlude... Now that that program
has been completed, we have come full circle and back to the problems left
behind unsolved. How does a wounded organism regenerate to exactly the
same structure it had before? How does the egg form the organism?... I think
in the next twenty-five years we are going to have to teach biologists anotherlanguage... I don't know what it's called yet; nobody knows... It may be wrong
to believe that all the logic is at the molecular level. We may need to get
beyond the clock mechanisms.1
Since the time Brenner made these comments, a new language for
understanding the complexity of living systems Ñ - that is, of organisms, social

systems, and ecosystems - has indeed emerged. You may have heard aboutsome of the key concepts of this new way of understanding complex systems chaos, attractors, fractals, dissipative structures, self-organization, and so on.
In the early eighties, I conceived a synthesis of these new discoveries, a new
conceptual framework for the scientific understanding of life. I developed and
refined my synthesis for ten years, discussed it with numerous scientists, andhave recently published it in my new book, The Web of Life.
The intellectual tradition of systems thinking, and the models of living systems
developed during the early decades of the century, form the conceptual and
historical roots of the new scientific framework that I want to present to you
tonight. In fact, my synthesis of current models and theories may be seen as
an outline of anemerging new theory of living systems. What is now emerging
at the forefront of science is a coherent scientific theory that offers, for the
first time, a unified view of mind, matter, and life.
Since industrial society has been dominated by the Cartesian split between
mind and matter and by the ensuing mechanistic paradigm for the past three
hundred years, this new vision that finally overcomesthe Cartesian split will
have not only important scientific and philosophical consequences, but will also
have tremendous practical implications. It will change the way we relate to
each other and to our living natural environment, the way we deal with our
health, the way we perceive our business organizations, our educational
systems, and many other social and political institutions
In...