According to Haraway, the cyborg as a paradigm becomes possible as a result of changes in the way science and technology have begun to reconceive their disciplines. As she points out,
Between the First World War and the present, biology has been transformed from a science centered on the organism, understood in functionalist terms, to a science studying automated technological devices, understood in terms of cybernetic systems. Organic form, with its hierarchical and physiological co-operation and competition based on 'natural' domination and division of labour, gave way to systems theory with its control schemes based on communications networks and a logical technology in which human beings became potentially outmoded symbol-using devices [Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991, 45]
Another component of this major change appears in the communications revoluton that involved the development of systems research:
A communications revolution means a re-theorizing of natural objects as technological devices properly understood in terms of mechanisms of production, transfer, and storage of information. . . . Operations research began with the Second World War and efforts to co-ordinate radar devices and information about the enemy position in a total systems way, which conceived of the human operator and physical machinery as the unified object of analysis. [58]
