AJP - Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, Vol 254, Issue 5 717-R726, Copyright © 1988 by American Physiological Society
Proposal for APS-IUPS convention for diagraming physiological mechanisms
C. Allweis
Department of Physiology, Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem, Israel.
As physiological research reveals the existence of systems of increasing
complexity and the existence of important interactions between them, the
diagrammatic depiction of those systems and their interactions becomes an
essential step in clarifying our own concepts in scientist-to-scientist
communication and in teaching. Although control engineers, electronic
engineers, and computer programmers long ago established their own
diagrammatic conventions, physiologists are only now beginning to feel the
need for a uniform convention suited to their own special needs in place of
the numerous (and mostly ad hoc) diagram types that have recently
proliferated in the literature. The convention proposed here is based on a
formal theory of mechanism developed by W. Ross Ashby (An Introduction to
Cybernetics, 1956). Its purely mechanistic structure transcends traditional
interdisciplinary barriers to communication. Wide acceptance of the
convention proposed here would therefore enhance the ability of physiology
to encompass mechanisms from molecular and cell biology and integrate them
with general and systems physiology in a metadisciplinary effort to
comprehend "the wisdom of the body." Among its many advantages is its
simplicity; diagrams may be drawn at various levels of detail and
complexity by use of a few basic rules, and they can be readily understood
without knowledge of the theory.
