Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Art University of Tehran

2 assistant professor

3 associated professor

Abstract

The systemic perspective does not only apply to living organisms, but also a wide range of cultural systems such as language and social behavior in human communities. A vast volume of interdisciplinary researches was carried out in the field of social sciences and cultural studies with the purpose of using the behavioral patterns of the living systems in order to study the development patterns of the cultural elements. These studies indicated that the complex systems share similar patterns and behaviors at the macro-level. With regard to these researches, the present qualitative study with systemic perspective, analyzes the similarities and differences between the reproduction patterns at a biological level and the reproduction and publication of meaning/information elements at the cultural level. Afterward, the results were generalized to the sign system - concentrating the artistic signs and symbols- in both semantic and morphological dimensions. The present study revealed that the properties of two reproduction strategies in nature, i.e. r-selection and k-selection, could be generalized, at the macro-level, to the reproduction of artistic signs and symbols at a cultural level, despite the obvious differences in the details. Taking into account these similarities in reproduction patterns, with an interdisciplinary perspective and different from other popular analyses, could lead to a different understanding of the reasons for some developments in the amount of reproduction and development of sign systems in various communities.

Keywords

 
- A. Ball, John. (1984). Memes as replicators. Ethology and Sociobiology, 5(3), 145-161.
- A. Umpleby, Stuart. (2007). Physical Relationships among Matter, Energy and Information. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 24(3),369-372. 
- Bertalanffy, Ludwig Von. (1968). General system theory: foundations, development, applications (revised). the University of Michigan.
- Blackmore, Susan. (1999) the Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Chandler, D. (2007). The basics semiotics. (3ed). London & New York: Routledge
- Fog, Agner. (1997). Cultural r/k Selection. Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, 1(1), 14-28.
- Fog, Agner. (1999). Cultural Selection. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
- Godfrey-smith, Peter. (2009). Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (First Published). Oxford University Press.
- Gorke, Alexander. (2006). Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Social Systems and Journalism Research. Journalism Studies, 7(4), 644-655.
- Heylighen, Francis., & L. Bernheim, Jan. (2004). From Quantity to Quality of Life:
r-K selection and human development. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/246254377. PDF
- Miller, James Grier. (1978). Living Systems (1 Edition). McGraw-Hill.
- Mitchell, Melanie. (2009). Complexity: A Guided Tour. Oxford University Press.
- Reznick, David., & J. Bryant, Michael., & Bashey, Farrah. (2002). R & K-Selection: The Role of Population Regulation in Life-History Evolution (revised). Ecology by the Ecological Society of America, 8
3(6),1509–1520