Regier, H., Kay. J., 2001. "Phase Shifts or Flip-Flops in Complex Systems",. Monitoring in Support of Policy: an Adaptive Ecosystem Approach, in Munn, T., (editor in chief), Vol.5 Encylopedia of Global Environmental Change, London, John Wiley and Son. pp.422-429.

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Living things self-organize into systems that must be partly closed to maintain identity and integrity, but must also stay partly open in order to accumulate high quality 'resources' in categories such as mass, energy and information and to void 'wastes' also belonging to these categories. A living thing must also stay partly open in order to interact, often reciprocally, with other living systems and with features of its non-living environment. Non-living things may also self-organize systemically, but in less complex ways.

Living things in general have evolved capabilities to self-organize into a number of different complex phases, states or stages and to shift from one of these to another in response to changes in internal and external phenomena. Many living systems, especially organisms, have evolved capabilities to proceed autonomously through cycles of such stages. The life history of an insect, for example, exhibits a progression from fertilization to egg to larva to pupa to adult to dead body. Such a one-way or ontogenetic development with transformations between stages may be perceived as a special case of the kind of organizational changes that we focus on here; we do not include such specialized one-way cases in the present discussion. Instead, we focus on systemic reorganizations that occur between different relatively stable states of a living complex system and are reversible, more or less. (Of course, strict reversibility is not possible because living systems are subject to the second law of thermodynamics.) The kind of shifts on which we focus here may occur abruptly and haphazardly in response to a particular kind of 'stimulus' that is relatively unexpected and catastrophic in its context; or it may occur in a more orderly way for some 'stimulus' that is always expected with significant probability in its context.

We emphasize that, for this essay, the concept 'shift between phases' has a similar meaning to 'flip between stable states' and 'a two-stage flip-flop between alternate states.' We do not include a concept of ontogenetic, one-way changes through a genetically pre-ordained series of stages; to do so would increase the scope of our essay beyond our present purposes.

We include as 'natural' some features of living things that some people would refer to as 'cultural.' Some species such as humans may exhibit strong 'cultural' features as well as the necessary 'natural' features, while other species such as bacteria may exhibit few if any 'cultural' features. We do not presume to understand fully any natural and natural/cultural features of reality that we address here. Some people may perceive some features of humans and human societies to be both 'cultural' and 'unnatural'; our intent is not to include consideration of such 'unnatural' features in the present essay.

The natural base of strongly cultural living systems must remain open to mass, energy, and information flows, as is the case with all living things. Cultural manifestations are also open 'culturally' in that they thrive on such 'resources' as beauty, ethical goodness, respect and caring and try to divest themselves of the opposite 'wastes' of these qualities, - ugliness, evil, disrespect and hate.

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