Self-organization denotes a class of instabilities in which a system spontaneously generates structure, diversity and/or specialization. From a thermodynamic point of view, transitions of this kind, which proceed against the general tendency for relaxation towards an unstructured equilibrium, can occur in energetically open systems and under far-from-equilibrium conditions. The exergy required to build up and maintain a non-equilibrium (so-called dissipative) structure can here be extracted from the continuous supply of energy (and/or resources). The interest of self-organizing systems originates in the work on irreversible thermodynamics performed primarily by the so-called Brussels school. According to this school, developments in biological, ecological, and social systems which involve qualitative change, diversification or increased complexity are also to be viewed as self-organizing processes. This applies for instance to the build-up of genetic information, the appearance of new species in an ecological system, the introduction of new techniques in a social system, the adoption of new scientific paradigms, and the penetration of new products. In the present paper we analyse the basic ideas of self-organization in terms of concepts familiar to System Dynamics practitioners. Through a series of relatively simple models it is shown how System Dynamics can be used as an efficient tool for modeling self-organizing systems. As a particular example we consider the evolution of cooperative structures (RNA molecules with their associated enzymes) in a prebiotic system.

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Date created

• 1983

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• Document

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• Processing documentation available at: https://wiki.albany.edu/display/SCA/Processing+Ingested+Digital+Files

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• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International

  
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System Dynamic Society Records

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• This collection is part of the University Archives