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Examines the challenge of the Daisyworld idea and relates it to Darwinian contentions. Looks at recursion processes and the emergence of sex in relation to the idea. Refers to new contributions that emphasize the significance of the Daisyworld concept.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the Daisyworld “parable” advanced by James Lovelock to account for the origin of global homeostasis, and to relate it to another type of model advanced in a physiological context.

The relevance of the Daisyworld model is examined in more detail than in an earlier discussion, and the relationship to physiological rein control is considered.

Both types of model exhibit effective and robust control and there is good reason to believe they usefully model forms of biological regulation.

There are implications for theories of global homeostasis and for physiology. A computer program modelling Daisyworld is made available.

The Javascript program that can be accessed online is new, though based on the earlier work of Lovelock and Watson. Much of the treatment depends on the work of Saunders et al.

Reviews considerations of information theory and feedback control as applied to biological systems, and particularly their impact on the early development of cybernetics. Also reviews Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and its extension to account for the emergence of global homeostatis using the Daisyworld model. The latter provides a compelling view of the origin of biological regulation, but one that is difficult to reconcile with the neural and hormonal regulatory processes in modern plants and animals.

The purpose of this article is to present an alternative theory to why publicly‐traded physician practice management companies in the US were popular and successful for a limited number of years and then essentially self‐destructed.

The short history of publicly‐traded practice management companies suggests that they had limited value and utility in the US healthcare industry. It is the premise of the paper that the sudden appearance these for‐profit companies upset the natural order within the healthcare industry and created a disequilibria which ultimately resulted in their demise. While Gaia theory is most commonly applied to the natural sciences, it has been applied to a number of interdisciplinary issues.

Physicians gravitated to these for‐profit companies either out of fear of encroaching managed care or out a desire to sell their practice to the highest bidder. Physician practice management companies, on the other hand, saw a way to entice stockholders to invest in a growth industry. The paper suggests that the physician practice management companies added little new value to the health care industry and applies Gaia theory as a possible explanation for this phenomena. Gaia theory was first postulated in 1979 to address the evolution of the material environment and corresponding organisms as a tightly coupled system which attempt to manipulate the environment for the purpose of creating biologically favorable conditions.

The paper is one of the first to suggest that the laws of nature, as understood from the perspective of Gaia theory, may have applicability to the US health care industry.

The purpose of this paper is to review the advantages of the Javascript programming language for demonstration programs. A major disadvantage is the difficulty of exporting data from such programs, felt particularly when graphical output is wanted. The paper describes and compares two ways of overcoming the difficulty.

One of the methods depends on transferring data from the screen display via the “clipboard”; the other involves transfer of data into e‐mail messages.

The “clipboard” method is the simpler and more intuitive of the two and was used by the author to produce graphs, but the e‐mail method could be advantageous where larger amounts of data have to be transferred.

Both of the methods are extremely tedious in use, and where data has to be transferred repeatedly, for instance in studies where repeated inspection of results in graphical form is needed, the solution would almost certainly be to choose a programming language other than Javascript.

The paper discusses what is believed to be a novel method of transfer of data using e‐mail.

The general problems of cybernetics were considered from an educational point of view in an address to the Convegno de Cibernetica Scolastica, in Messina, Sicily. To do this satisfactorily the meaning of cybernetics should be discussed and the history of the emergence of the subject area reviewed with special reference to the future. Important implications for education are presented.

Recent publications, including Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2009) and A New Biology for the 21st Century (National Research Council, 2009), highlight needed changes for undergraduate science education. These include a shift away from traditionally structured lab courses toward more authentic scientific inquiry experiences in undergraduate science laboratories. The aim of these reform initiatives is for students to develop not only conceptual understanding of the big ideas of science but also the skills required to conduct an investigation and an understanding of science as a human process of constructing scientific knowledge (National Research Council, 2011). The work that we describe here examines the challenges and successes of engaging nonscience majors in a large introductory university-level science course in conducting scientific inquiry. To understand the course structure and the nature of the laboratory experiences, we describe two different lab experiences. In both cases, students engaged in guided inquiry and then were asked to engage in a more open-ended inquiry experience. Our findings suggest that students need significant scaffolding to make the transition from more guided inquiry to more open-ended inquiry.

Considers that in ecosystem, landscape and global ecology, an energetics reading of ecological systems is an expression of a cybernetic, systemic and holistic approach. In ecosystem ecology, the Odumian paradigm emphasizes the concept of emergence, but it has not been accompanied by the creation of a method that fully respects the complexity of the objects studied. In landscape ecology, although the emergentist, multi‐level, triadic methodology of J.K. Feibleman and D.T. Campbell has gained acceptance, the importance of emergent properties is still undervalued. In global ecology, the Gaia hypothesis is an expression of an organicist metaphor, while the emergentist terminology used is incongruent with the underlying physicalist cybernetics. More generally, an analytico‐additional methodology and the reduction of the properties of ecosystems to the laws of physical chemistry render purely formal any assertion about the emergentist and holistic nature of the ecological systems studied.

In our technological age business is one of the greatest destroyers of the natural environment. At present, we do not have any appropriate theory of business that would be consistent with ecology, that is, contains a well‐articulated ecological point of view. This article is an attempt to meet this need.