Adaptive Quotes
More Adaptive Quotes
This use of building blocks to generate internal models is a pervasive feature of complex adaptive systems.
john henry holland— p. 37 (Ch 1. Basic Elements)
Independent derivation meshed beautifully with the triumph, from the 1930's on, of a strict version of Darwinism based on the near ubiquity of adaptive design built by natural selection... Arthropods and vertebrates do share several features of functional design. But those similarities only reflect the power of natural selection to craft optimal structures independently in a world of limited biomechanical solutions to common functional problems - an evolutionary phenomenon called convergence .
stephen jay gould— "Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 328
The second model is the functionalist model of mind. The organism through acquired S-R responses or through operations on the environmental manages to stay alive and adjust itself to the environment. The Thorndykian and Skinnerian approaches to learning and the adaptive model of the psychoanalytical theory come under this heading.
— p. 102 (Models of Mental Illness (1984))
A more viable model, one much more faithful to the kind of system that society is more and more recognized to be, is in process of developing out of, or is in keeping with, the modern systems perspective (which we use loosely here to refer to general systems research, cybernetics, information and communication theory, and related fields). Society, or the sociocultural system, is not, then, principally an equilibrium system or a homeostatic system, but what we shall simply refer to as a complex adaptive system.
— Walter F. Buckley (1968) "Society as a complex adaptive system" in: Modern systems research for the behavioral scientist. Walter Buckley ed. p. 490
Both from these scanty data and from an examination of the postulates of the economic models it appears probable that, however adaptive the behavior of organisms in learning and choice situations, this adaptiveness falls far short of the ideal of ‘maximizing’ postulated in economic theory. Evidently, organisms adapt well enough to‘satisfice’; theydo not, in general, ‘optimize’.
— Herbert A. Simon (1956) in “Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment”, Psychological Review 63(2), p.129, quoted in “Bounded Rationality and Macroeconomics”
A comparative examination of the models of adaptive behavior employed in psychology (e.g., learning theories), and of the models of rational behavior employed in economics, shows that in almost all respects the latter postulate a much greater complexity in the choice mechanisms, and a much larger capacity in the organism for obtaining information and performing computations, than do the former. Moreover, in the limited range of situations where the predictions of the two theories have been compared (...), the learning theories appear to account for the observed behavior rather better than do the theories of rational behavior.
— Herbert A. Simon (1956) in “Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment”, Psychological Review 63(2), p.129, quoted in “Bounded Rationality and Macroeconomics”
A basic assumption within these theories is that organizations are complex adaptive systems (Anderson, 1999; Axelrod and Cohen, 1999), composed of semiautonomous agents that seek to maximize fitness by adjusting interpretative and action-oriented schema that determine how they view and interact with other agents and the environment.
— Kevin Dooley et al. (2003: 62): Cited in: Antonacopoulou, E. P., and Ricardo Chiva. "Social complex evolving systems: Implications for organizational learning." 6th International Organizational Knowledge, Learning and Capabilities Conference, Boston, MA, USA. 2005.
A complex adaptive system acquires information about its environment and its own interaction with that environment, identifying regularities in that information, condensing those regularities into a kind of "schema", or model, and acting in the real world on the basis of that schema.
— Murray Gell-Mann (1995) The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, p. 17
The main task of any theory of evolution is to explain adaptive complexity, that is, to explain the same set of facts that Paley used as evidence of a creator.
— John Maynard Smith, "The status of neo-darwinism", in C.H. Waddington, ed., Towards a Theoretical Biology (University Press, Edinburgh, 1969)
A complex adaptive system is composed of interacting 'agents' following rules, exchanging influence with their local and global environments and altering the very environment they are responding to by virtue of their simple actions.
— Sherman, H. and Schultz, R. (1998) Open Boundaries. New York: Perseus Books. Cited in: Antonacopoulou & Chiva (2005)
