How To Find

Up to this point, our researchers have merely looked at the general systems literature since about 1950 and two science journals to find ISP’s. They also have covered the many texts or books that have been published on each of the more recognized isomorphies, such as those on fractals, chaos, feedback, self-organization, self-criticality, etc.

The two science journals covered are perhaps the most read and respected and top of the line for interdisciplinary publications. Every young scientist has the ambition to publish in Science and Nature. It is very difficult to pass the peer review for these essentially reductionist journals. But since they cover virtually all of the conventional science-based disciplines, they are a good source for finding the recognition of cross-disciplinary mechanisms in the many disciplinary phenomena they study. Up until now (2018), we have collected 3,500 such reprints on our list of isomorphies, organized in our files by isomorphy and then discipline.

We have also noticed a definitive trend across all the years of collection. More and more, these isomorphies by name are becoming recognized in the conventional disciplines. For example, biological genetics used to talk about “up-regulation” and “down-regulation” in the early reprints, but now use positive feedback and negative feedback also. For example, astronomy is beginning to talk explicitly about feedbacks in the formation of both solar systems and galaxies. It is not uncommon for geology to talk about fractals in stream beds on our earth or even to use it as a proxy for interpretation of moon and exoplanet formations.