W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive. Ross Ashby was one of the original members of the Ratio Club, a small informal dining club of young psychologists, physiologists, mathematicians and engineers who met to discuss issues in cybernetics. The club was founded in 1949 by the neurologist John Bates and continued to meet until 1958. The title of his book "An Introduction to Cybernetics" popularised the usage of the term 'cybernetics' to refer to self-regulating systems, originally coined by Norbert Wiener in "". The book dealt primarily with homeostatic processes within living organisms, rather than in an engineering or electronic context. Earlier, in 1946, Alan
Scientific imperialism Scientific imperialism Scientific imperialism is a term that appears to have been coined by Dr. Ellis T. Powell when addressing the Commonwealth Club of Canada on 8 September 1920. Though he defined imperialism as "the sense of arbitrary and capricious domination over the bodies and souls of men," yet he used the term "scientific imperialism" to mean "the subjection of all the developed and undeveloped powers of the earth to the mind of man." In modern parlance, however, scientific imperialism refers to situations in which critics perceive science to act imperiously. Philosopher of science John Dupré described it (in his