An exploration of how domain-specific literacies — ocean, earth, climate, data, network — converge through empirically cataloged enduring patterns toward a deeper understanding of how systems work. Each thinker page presents one mind's contribution to this understanding, navigable as a knowledge graph.
The understanding that everything is interconnected — that wholes behave differently from the sum of their parts, that systems self-regulate and evolve — has emerged from multiple traditions. We present two parallel streams, not as predecessor and successor, but as distinct ways of knowing that illuminate one another.
Continuous, living knowledge systems that have always understood interconnectedness, reciprocity, and adaptive coordination. From Aboriginal Australian songlines to Māori Mātauranga, from First Nations Medicine Wheels to Vedic holistic cosmology — these traditions embody relational ontology not as theory but as lived reality. They represent prior and ongoing understanding, not precursors waiting for Western validation.
Indigenous peoples never separated their world into "systems" in the first place. Western systems thinking is, in part, the Western tradition's slow journey back toward understanding that indigenous peoples never left.
From Greek teleological thinking through Islamic preservation and extension of feedback mechanisms, through Enlightenment mechanism, through 20th century cybernetics and systems theory as corrections to over-mechanization. This tradition formalized and theorized about regulation, communication, and control as abstract principles — making the reflexive, meta-theoretical move that distinguishes cybernetics and systems science as disciplines.
The genealogy below traces not a single lineage but converging streams of original thought.
Each thinker page is self-contained — a standalone exploration of one mind's contribution to understanding how systems work. Each has its own knowledge graph. Visit, explore, and navigate one thinker's conceptual world.