COMPARISON OF RULE BOUND SYSTEMS THEORY TO TRADITIONAL SYSTEMS THEORY
Paul A. Ballonoff · Cybernetics & Systems · 1996
The purpose of the study of human culture has been called the study of human survival. It is almost self-evident that the single most important fact to a system of marriage is the survival of the population. Certainly many other human cultural systems, such as political and legal systems, have this same objective. Indeed, continued survivalof any self-organizing system that must self-replace its membership by reproduction has the same property. Therefore the most important measure of information about such systems, from the point of view of the system, is whether the probability of continued existence of the population approaches 1 after the act of reproduction is carried out on the subsystem governed by the rules in question. This seemingly simple fact explains the mathematical structure of the theory of rule bound systems. It explains why and how rule bound theory differs from traditional systems theory; whyinformation theory, but not thermodynamics, applies to rule bound cultural systems; why mathematical groups are a typical and perhaps necessary characteristic of the rule structure of rule bound systems; why the mathematics of human cultural systems require the Stirling number of the second kind but the statistics of systems studied by traditional theory require the Stirling number of the first kind; and why study of minimal systems satisfying a rule also may describe characteristics of larger systems using the same rule.