Info 202 Fall 2011

Now that we're over a month into our semester, the concepts we learned early on in 202 are starting to seem somewhat obvious and second nature.  Judging from our class Twitter feed, most of us are seeing organizing systems everywhere we go and generally it's easy to determine whether something is an organizing system or not.  When I read this article on slime mold, I wasn't sure.  While we exclude "naturally occurring patterns created by biological processes" from our definition, some of the slime mold's behavior seems purposeful.  If we exclude slime mold communities from our definition of an organizing system, but then WE use their dynamic organization to model processes in the human world, are we conferring the title of Organizing System on them?  Do we create an organizing system by virtue of using something as if it is one?

I found the ways in which slime mold organizes itself fascinating, along with the ways in which scientists are using slime mold to model things like optimal highway systems and recovery from nuclear warfare.  However, after reading the article I was hard pressed to come up with a final answer on the question of "By Whom is the System Being Organized."  Are we organizing them or are they organizing themselves?  And how many of these interactions are intentional? 

Finally, classifying slime mold seemed especially hard, given that a lot of our typical organizing system questions were hard to answer.  If a single-celled slime mold merges its DNA with another single-celled slime mold to create a larger single-celled slime mold, how do we classify this?  Are these different kinds of organisms or the same?  If the same slime mold changes its intrinsic physical properties, and it's role, and it's location, is it still the same resource?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/science/04slime.html?pagewanted=1&hpw