Just the other day I ruminated on the difference between tight and loose systems. Better terminology might have been centralized and decentralized organization.

Those are the terms Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom use in their new book, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. The two animals may look similar, but their systemic natures differ greatly. Cut up the legs of a starfish, and new starfish can grow from the severed portions. Cut off a leg of a spider, you have a crippled spider . . . and no leg regrowth. Cut off a spider's head, and the spider dies.

The authors extrapolate from there.

It looks like a fascinating book. I note that the topic is relevant to all sorts of things, as we'd expect from General Systems Theory. It's of special relevance to social theory and evolution, as was made fairly clear by an early proponent of such explanation, Herbert Spencer. Like Spencer, the authors draw a number of both broad and detailed conclusions from a basic distinction in systems theory.

How to fight Al-Qaida is one of those.

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