Valentin Fyodorovich Turchin (Russian: Валенти́н Фёдорович Турчи́н, 14 February 1931 – 7 April 2010) was a Soviet and American physicist, cybernetician, and computer scientist.

[3] In 1970 he authored "The Phenomenon of Science",[4] a grand cybernetic meta-theory of universal evolution, which broadened and deepened the earlier book.

By 1973, Turchin had founded the Moscow chapter of Amnesty International with Andrey Tverdokhlebov and was working closely with the well-known physicist and Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov.

In 1990, together with Cliff Joslyn and Francis Heylighen, he founded the Principia Cybernetica Project, a worldwide organization devoted to the collaborative development of an evolutionary-cybernetic philosophy.

The philosophical core of Turchin's scientific work is the concept of the metasystem transition, which denotes the evolutionary process through which higher levels of control emerge in system structure and function.