Csanyi, Vilmos, and Vilmos Csányi. Evolutionary systems and society: A general theory of life, mind, and culture . Duke University Press, 1989.
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I have been studying evolutionary systems since the middle of the 1970s. Results of this work were published first in Hungarian (Csanyi 1978. 1979) and later in English (Csanyi 1980, 1981, 1982) as a general theory of evolution. I sought to formulate the mechanisms and laws of biological evolution within a general framework so as to search out and characterize analogies at the higher levels of biosocial organiza-tion. The laws of a general evolutionary process inherent in Nature were first formulated by Spencer (1862). but a favorable intellectual and spiritual environment for such a theory. encompassing both natural and social sciences, seemed to develop only in the past few years. With regard to its main tenets this second version of my general theory of evolution is identical with the first, but it has been ex-tended to include new results, which were born during the refinement of some of its concepts and our further, recently published theoretical work (Csanyi 1985, I987a, 1987b; Csanyi and Kampis 1985; Kampis and Csanyi 1985, 1987a, 1987b, 1987c). The most important devel-opment is that I have attempted to fit my study of evolutionary pro-cesses into the framework of the General Systems Theory developed by Bertalanffy and others (Bertalanffy 1968). This, I believe, makes a more exact and rigorous formulation possible.