Читать книгу General system theory of aging. Special role of the immune system - V. I. Dontsov - Страница 7

The presence of hundreds of theories of aging to date indicates not only and not so much the lack of a unified theory, general views, or lack of knowledge of the causes and essence of aging, but often a methodological lack of understanding of the subject matter. Although many gerontologists understood the importance of general biological laws (Bogomolets, 1938; Comfort, 1967; Dilman, 1981; Dogel, 1922; Frolkis V.V., Muradjan, 1992; Korshelt, 1925; Streler, 1964; Shmalgausen, 1926; Nagorny A.V., Nikitin V.N., Bulankin, 1963; Vojtenko, Poljuhov, 1986; Zavadsky, 1923), the main attention was drawn to the study of specific mechanisms of aging, issued as a reason. Science in historical development has gone through three stages, and each is characterized by its own general paradigm.

The first stage is determinism, which has received its maximum expression, apparently, in Laplace. According to his extreme ideas, know-ledge of the initial conditions uniquely determines everything that follows: knowledge of the initial coordinates and momentum of all particles at the Beginning of the World uniquely determines its picture to the present moment and the future of the World. The main disadvantage of this methodical approach is the mechanism: everything is predetermined by initial conditions, there is no freedom, in fact, there is no place for life, feeling, intelligence, free will and the whole diversity of the real World.

The subsequent development of science has changed this view of the opposite. The stochastic vision of the World, most pronounced in probability theory and quantum mechanics, was based on the recognition of a physical law stating that it is impossible to simultaneously and accurately determine the coordinate and momentum – the uncertainty principle in quantum physics. However, the proliferation of global stochasticity as a method from the micro level to the level of complex objects led to another extreme – the general unpredictability of phenomena, which also does not correspond to the state of things.

The development of a systems approach brought science out of a methodological crisis, while not discarding what has been achieved. Already one enumeration of its characteristic features, shown below, shows the enormous potential possibilities of a systematic approach – a new, whole world view (Checkland, 1986; Wolfram, 2002, etc.).