The Universal & Atomic Elements of Organization
A falsifiable scientific theory proposing that the same irreducible structures organize both thought and reality — from the quantum to the social scale.
O-Theory proposes that four irreducible structures — Distinctions, Systems, Relationships and Perspectives (DSRP) — form the universal grammar of organization. Rather than being merely useful ways of thinking, these structures are hypothesized to be the atomic elements from which every organized phenomenon emerges, whether in cognition, biology, physics, mathematics, society, or the cosmos.
| D | S | R | P |
| Distinctions | Systems | Relationships | Perspectives |
| Identity ↔ Other | Part ↔ Whole | Action ↔ Reaction | Point ↔ View |
| D := (i ↔ o) | S := (p ↔ w) | R := (a ↔ r) | P := (ṗ ↔ v) |
This is a living scientific evidence compendium: an open, continually evolving collection of independent empirical research, formal theory, mathematical proofs, cross-disciplinary analyses, applications, critiques, and proposed falsifications. Every entry is included because it supports, refines, challenges, or attempts to falsify the theory.
Scientific theories are strengthened not only by evidence that confirms their predictions, but also by surviving attempts to falsify them. This compendium brings both together: independent evidence from researchers who were not testing DSRP and proposed counterexamples evaluated against the formal theory.
One counterexample is enough to falsify O-Theory. Until then, the question remains: do the same four structures organize everything from quantum systems to human thought?
Independent convergence is one of the strongest forms of scientific evidence because researchers arrive at the same conclusion while investigating different questions for different reasons.
The number is not the point. Researchers in different fields, studying different questions with different methods, repeatedly arrived at the same structural predictions—almost always without testing DSRP or using its language.
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This compendium began as the peer-reviewed literature review “A Literature Review of the Universal and Atomic Elements of Complex Cognition,” published in the Journal of Systems Thinking with 109 studies. That paper is the peer-reviewed foundation. What you see here is its living, continuously updated version . New studies are checked before they are added, and the collection now holds and keeps growing. Open any card to see what the researchers found, why it bears on DSRP, and where the original review discusses it, the fuller account.
The collection is updated continuously, so the citation carries the date you consulted it rather than a study count — the count changes weekly, and putting it in the reference would make the same collection look like a different work to everyone who cites it. To cite a single claim or study, use its own address: every one has a permanent link.
This is the adversarial half of the compendium. Where the evidence track asks what converges on DSRP, this one asks what would end it: a single organized phenomenon whose structure needs a fifth pattern, a ninth element, or a fifth structural dynamic. It holds written up from candidates across territories, and resolutions — the general answers those cases settle against. Every case is published whether it held or failed, including the ones still open.
Cite this rather than the evidence collection when the point is what survived attack. The two are separate works with separate addresses: one asks what converges on the theory, the other asks what would end it, and a reference to the first does not support a claim about the second. Case and resolution numbers change when the record is revised, so cite a case by its own permanent link rather than by number.
This collection is meant to keep growing. Send us a study, paper, book or critique that bears on DSRP, whether it supports the theory or cuts against it, and we will read it and decide whether it belongs.
Authors Jenkins B
Year 2021
Publisher Journal of Systems Thinking 1(1):1-13
Kind of work article
Discipline Environment & Sustainability
Reading level technical
Kind of engagement scholarly
Read it at the publisher 10.54120/jost.v1i1.1251
A sustainability framework based on nested adaptive socio-ecological systems is used to analyse historical examples of soil erosion and its implications for food production and security for a growing population. While there are examples of innovation in agriculture to address food availability, there are also cases of inadequate social responses leading to famine. The analysis highlights the value of considering these issues in a framework of linked biophysical and socio-economic systems. The socio-economic system generates management interventions to resolve biophysical limitations such as soil depletion on food production. The socio-economic system is also responsible when there are inadequate social responses. Currently, the biophysical system produces enough food to feed the world population. However, food distribution through the socio-economic system results in increasing numbers of undernourished people. Biophysical system modelling indicates that unless major changes are made to the current world system, overshoot because of resource depletion will lead to system collapse within the 21st century. To develop sustainability strategies, we need to analyse the socio-economic response to this biophysical vulnerability. A socio-ecological analysis also indicates that perspectives based on power relations that govern real-world decision making rather than sustainability interventions to address food security, need to be incorporated.
A paper applying a sustainability framework of nested adaptive socio-ecological systems to historical soil erosion and its consequences for food production and security.
The biophysical system currently produces enough food, but distribution through the socio-economic system leaves growing numbers undernourished — and without major changes, resource-depletion overshoot points toward system collapse within the 21st century.
Uses a framework of nested socio-ecological systems to analyze historical cases of soil erosion and what they meant for food security.
Jenkins places his own sustainability framework inside the DSRP structure rather than citing it in passing. Two sections are titled for it, “Relationship to DSRP” and “Relationship to DSRP Structure”, and Figure 7 draws the nested adaptive system framework as a DSRP structure. The reading is structural: socio-economic against biophysical systems, and one spatial scale against another, are the distinctions; the adaptive cycle with its four phases is a molecular structure in DSRP terms; and the linked cycles that make a nested adaptive system are the compound structure the framework rests on.
The discussion then puts perspectives to work. It sets the Malthusian reading of population outstripping food supply against the Godwinian reading of ingenuity raising production, and shows that which one is held decides which intervention is adopted — short-term profit maximisation overriding sustainable land management in the tobacco country of the American South. Jenkins takes that as the generic value of DSRP thinking, which he places as the fourth wave of systems thinking against his own framework as an example of the third. Five Cabrera works are cited.
Patterns it shows S, R, P
How to cite this Jenkins B (2021). Systems Thinking for Sustainability: Illustrated by the Application to Soil Erosion and Food Security. Journal of Systems Thinking 1(1):1-13.