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Tools for Thought: How to Understand and Apply the Latest Scientific Techniques of Problem Solving

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C. H. Waddington, a geneticist who died in 1975 and wrote on a wide variety of scientifically-related subjects for professional and popular audiences, presents here a survey of theories and methods for dealing with complex systems, including human beings and human societies. Waddington includes "Considerations of complex shapes, of interactions, of processes, of stabilities, traffic of information and instructions, games theories, forecasting, statistics and more classical scientific analyses..." (232). On the minus side some of his emphases such as the importance of catastrophe theory for understanding system changes may seem dated. His compendium of cross-disciplinary methods, necessarily abstract, provides difficult reading at times. On the plus side, Waddington's clear writing style makes the process easier. His philosophy reinforces and resonates with Alfred Korzybski's non-aristotelian views. Waddington urged throughout a reassessment of how we think in order to move beyond what he calls the "Conventional Wisdom of the Dominant Group" or "COWDUNG" (16).

Confusion in the middle name Dresdin, I guess.

Waddington founded operations research mathematics during

WWII, devolved about an assembly of British anti-submarine

aircraft. Photos were taken of attacks, and the assembly

modified.

Waddington's group, including Fraser (structural orthoganality,

as noted, Thom, Goodwin, Elssaser, others.

A set of books by a collection of theortical biologists.

Goodwin's book, Temporal Organization in Cells, was

computerized by Fraser.

If there is a paradigm shift somewhere in here,...

perhaps, ocular brain dysfunction.. the signpost well marked

by the WWI doctor, Dr. Gordon Holmes.

spotter109

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