"The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world." (Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1820)
"As long as men inquire, they will find opportunities to know more upon these topics than those who have gone before them, so inexhaustibly rich is nature in the innermost diversity of her treasures of beauty, order, and intelligence." (J Louis R Agassiz, "Essay on Classification", 1859)
"Unity of plan everywhere lies hidden under the mask of diversity of structure - the complex is everywhere evolved out of the simple." (Thomas H Huxley, "A Lobster; or, the Study of Zoology", 1861)
"[...] the simplicity of nature which we at present grasp is really the result of infinite complexity; and that below the uniformity there underlies a diversity whose depths we have not yet probed, and whose secret places are still beyond our reach." (William Spottiswoode, [Report of the Forty-eighth Meeting of the British Association for the, Advancement of Science] 1878)
"Cybernetics is likely to reveal a great number of interesting and suggestive parallelisms between machine and brain and society. And it can provide the common language by which discoveries in one branch can readily be made use of in the others. [...] [There are] two peculiar scientific virtues of cybernetics that are worth explicit mention. One is that it offers a single vocabulary and a single set of concepts suitable for representing the most diverse types of system. [...] The second peculiar virtue of cybernetics is that it offers a method for the scientific treatment of the system in which complexity is outstanding and too important to be ignored. Such systems are, as we well know, only too common in the biological world!" (W Ross Ashby, "An Introduction to Cybernetics", 1956)
"Scientific research utilises models in many places, as instruments in the service of many different needs. The first requirement a study of model-building in science should satisfy is not to neglect this undeniable diversity (as has sometimes been done), and, when recognising this multiplicity, to realise that the same instrument cannot perform all those functions (often the multiplicity of function is recognised but either not to a full extent, or not with respect to the difference of structure it implies)." (Leo Apostel, "Towards the formal study of models in the non-formal sciences", Synthese Vol. 12 (2-3), 1960)
"Science is the reduction of the bewildering diversity of unique events to manageable uniformity within one of a number of symbol systems, and technology is the art of using these symbol systems so as to control and organize unique events. Scientific observation is always a viewing of things through the refracting medium of a symbol system, and technological praxis is always handling of things in ways that some symbol system has dictated. Education in science and technology is essentially education on the symbol level." (Aldous L Huxley, "Essay", Daedalus, 1962)
"The words 'general systems theory' imply that some things can usefully be said about (living) systems in general, despite the immense diversity of their specific forms. One of these things should be a scheme of classification. Every science begins by classifying its subject matter, if only descriptively, and learns a lot about it in the process; and systems especially need this attention, because an adequate classification cuts across familiar boundaries and at the same time draws valid and important distinctions which have previously been sensed but not defined." (Geoffrey Vickers, 1970)
"Whereas traditional reductionism sought to find the commonality underlying diversity in reference to a shared substance, such as material atoms, contemporary systems theory seeks to find common features in terms of shared aspects of organization." (Ervin László, "The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for Our Time", 1972)
"Every phenomenon is related to other phenomena by connections of more than one value. It is the result both of certain conditions and certain basic factors that act as its cause. That is why the cause-effect connection has to be artificially isolated from the rest of conditions so that we can see this connection in its 'pure form'. But this is achieved only by abstraction. In reality we cannot isolate this connection from the whole set of conditions. There is always a closely interwoven mass of extremely diverse secondary conditions, which leave their mark on the form in which the general connection emerges. This means that there can never be two exactly identical phenomena, even if they are generated by the same causes. They have always developed in empirically different conditions. So there can be no absolute identity in the world." (Alexander Spirkin, "Dialectical Materialism", 1983)
"The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology." (Murray Bookchin,"What Is Social Ecology?" , 1984)
"Any system that insulates itself from diversity in the environment tends to atrophy and lose its complexity and distinctive nature." (Gareth Morgan, "Images of Organization", 1986)
"The principle of maximum diversity operates both at the physical and at the mental level. It says that the laws of nature and the initial conditions are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Always when things are dull, something new turns up to challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut. Examples of things which make life difficult are all around us: comet impacts, ice ages, weapons, plagues, nuclear fission, computers, sex, sin and death. Not all challenges can be overcome, and so we have tragedy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth." (Freeman Dyson, "Infinite in All Directions", 1988)
"A world view is a system of co-ordinates or a frame of reference in which everything presented to us by our diverse experiences can be placed. It is a symbolic system of representation that allows us to integrate everything we know about the world and ourselves into a global picture, one that illuminates reality as it is presented to us within a certain culture. […] A world view is a coherent collection of concepts and theorems that must allow us to construct a global image of the world, and in this way to understand as many elements of our experience as possible." (Diederick Aerts et al, "World views: From Fragmentation to Integration", 1994)
"There are a variety of swarm topologies, but the only organization that holds a genuine plurality of shapes is the grand mesh. In fact, a plurality of truly divergent components can only remain coherent in a network. No other arrangement-chain, pyramid, tree, circle, hub-can contain true diversity working as a whole. This is why the network is nearly synonymous with democracy or the market." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"There is a new science of complexity which says that the link between cause and effect is increasingly difficult to trace; that change (planned or otherwise) unfolds in non-linear ways; that paradoxes and contradictions abound; and that creative solutions arise out of diversity, uncertainty and chaos." (Andy P Hargreaves & Michael Fullan, "What’s Worth Fighting for Out There?", 1998)
"We use mathematics and statistics to describe the diverse realms of randomness. From these descriptions, we attempt to glean insights into the workings of chance and to search for hidden causes. With such tools in hand, we seek patterns and relationships and propose predictions that help us make sense of the world." (Ivars Peterson, "The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari", 1998)
"The three basic mechanisms of averaging, feedback and division of labor give us a first idea of a how a CMM [Collective Mental Map] can be developed in the most efficient way, that is, how a given number of individuals can achieve a maximum of collective problem-solving competence. A collective mental map is developed basically by superposing a number of individual mental maps. There must be sufficient diversity among these individual maps to cover an as large as possible domain, yet sufficient redundancy so that the overlap between maps is large enough to make the resulting graph fully connected, and so that each preference in the map is the superposition of a number of individual preferences that is large enough to cancel out individual fluctuations. The best way to quickly expand and improve the map and fill in gaps is to use a positive feedback that encourages individuals to use high preference paths discovered by others, yet is not so strong that it discourages the exploration of new paths." (Francis Heylighen, "Collective Intelligence and its Implementation on the Web", 1999)
"The model [of reality] takes on a life of its own, in which its future is under perpetual construction through the micro interactions of the diverse entities comprising it. The 'final' form toward which it moves is not given in the model itself, nor is it being chosen from outside the model. The forms continually emerge in an unpredictable way as the system moves into the unknown. However, there is nothing mysterious or esoteric about this. What emerges does so because of the transformative cause of the process of the micro interactions, the fluctuations themselves." (Ralph D Stacey et al, "Complexity and Management: Fad or Radical Challenge to Systems Thinking?", 2000)
"The diversity of networks in business and the economy is mindboggling. There are policy networks, ownership networks, collaboration networks, organizational networks, network marketing-you name it. It would be impossible to integrate these diverse interactions into a single all-encompassing web. Yet no matter what organizational level we look at, the same robust and universal laws that govern nature's webs seem to greet us. The challenge is for economic and network research alike to put these laws into practice." (Albert-László Barabási, "Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life", 2002)
"However, the law of accelerating returns pertains to evolution, which is not a closed system. It takes place amid great chaos and indeed depends on the disorder in its midst, from which it draws its options for diversity. And from these options, an evolutionary process continually prunes its choices to create ever greater order." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Singularity is Near", 2005)
"The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)
"Learning emerges from discovery, not directives; reflection, not rules; possibilities, not prescriptions; diversity, not dogma; creativity and curiosity, not conformity and certainty; and meaning, not mandates." (Stephanie P Marshall, "The Power to Transform: Leadership That Brings Learning and Schooling to Life", 2006)
"[chaos theory] presents a universe that is at once deterministic and obeys the fundamental physical laws, but is capable of disorder, complexity, and unpredictability. It shows that predictability is a rare phenomenon operating only within the constraints that science has filtered out from the rich diversity of our complex world." (Ziauddin Sardar & Iwona Abrams, "Introducing Chaos: A Graphic Guide", 2008)
"Let's face it, the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and chaotic. It is dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity, not uniformity. That's what makes the world interesting, that's what makes it beautiful, and that's what makes it work." (Donella H Meadow, "Thinking in Systems: A Primer", 2008)
"The real challenge to building a viable social system is the ability to create unity in diversity, meeting the varying interests of independent members operating in an interdependent whole. […] In the long run, the society and the individual either stand together or fall separately. A win/win relationship is achieved not through zero-sum or even compromise. For both of them to win requires reconceptualization of the nature and the relationship of the whole and the parts." (Jamshid Gharajedaghi, "Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity A Platform for Designing Business Architecture" 3rd Ed., 2011)
"The exploding interest in network science during the first decade of the 21st century is rooted in the discovery that despite the obvious diversity of complex systems, the structure and the evolution of the networks behind each system is driven by a common set of fundamental laws and principles. Therefore, notwithstanding the amazing differences in form, size, nature, age, and scope of real networks, most networks are driven by common organizing principles. Once we disregard the nature of the components and the precise nature of the interactions between them, the obtained networks are more similar than different from each other." (Albert-László Barabási, "Network Science", 2016)
"A significant factor missing from any form of artificial intelligence is the inability of machines to learn based on real life experience. Diversity of life experience is the single most powerful characteristic of being human and enhances how we think, how we learn, our ideas and our ability to innovate. Machines exist in a homogeneous ecosystem, which is ok for solving known challenges, however even Artificial General Intelligence will never challenge humanity in being able to acquire the knowledge, creativity and foresight needed to meet the challenges of the unknown." (Tom Golway, 2021)
