Abstract
This chapter introduces and explores the fundamental organizing principles of systems. Up until now, we have been describing how systems are, how they are organized, how they work, etc. Starting in this chapter, we will be examining the general processes that account for how systems, particularly complex ones, actually come into existence, how they get to be how they are. Underlying the development of complex systems are the twin processes of auto-organization and emergence. These, in turn, are part of an overarching process, that of evolution, which will be covered in the subsequent chapter. Auto-organization explains how components of systems first start to organize and interoperate. Emergence explains how functions come into existence at a level of organization built upon what new structures have auto-organized and have survived within their environments. Perhaps the paradigm example of these processes at work is the origin of life.
“…nature yields at every level novel structures and behaviors selected from the huge domain of the possible by pruning, which extracts the actual from the possible.”
Harold J. Morowitz , from The Emergence of Everything, page 14.
“…the flow of energy through a system acts to organize that system.”
Harold J. Morowitz , from Energy Flow in Biology, page 2. italics in the original.
“The hallmark of emergence is this sense of much coming from little. This feature also makes emergence a mysterious, almost paradoxical, phenomenon….”
John H. Holland , from Emergence, page 2.
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- 1.
Many authors have used the term ‘self-organization ’ to describe a process of a potentially complex system evolving toward an organized (realized complexity ) system. The difficulty with the term “self ” is that it can convey the meaning of intention which is inappropriate. In many scientific contexts, the term “auto” implies that the system itself contains the necessary explanation for its own dynamics. We prefer to use this term, so readers need to be aware that when they run into the terminology “self-…” in the literature, it means essentially “auto-….”.
- 2.
Prigogine and Stengers (1984).
- 3.
Morowitz (1968). The technical details are well beyond the scope of this book, but the arguments here should give the reader a better sense of why organization and order are related concepts.
- 4.
For example, an electron-like particle but having a positive electric charge is called a positron.
- 5.
Some authors prefer to use the term “preadapted” to distinguish it; however, the problem of interpreting what causes the change remains.
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- 7.
- 8.
Herbert Simon , in 1956, coined the term “satisfice” to describe a suboptimal but satisfactory solution that could be found in reasonable time. He suggested that satisficing was a more appropriate approach to solving very complex optimization problems. See Simon (1983) for a more recent description of this and related concepts.
- 9.
Autopoiesis or self-regeneration/construction is a property (or rather a function ) of living organisms and so must have emerged at the origin of life .
- 10.
Actually there are cells that are simpler than bacteria in the domain Archaea. But for our purposes, any bacterium will do.
- 11.
There is a potential contradiction to this in the form of self-assembly in which the personalities of the components are so structured that as connections are made, no other kind of organization is possible. Self-assembly still requires the flux of appropriate energy in order to proceed. In some cases, however, it may involve first agitating the components by heating, followed by cooling to allow them to settle into their “preferred” structures.
- 12.
Actually the very central core is solid, probably iron-nickel composition, because the pressures due to gravity at that depth overcome the liquefaction of those metals. The solid inner core rotates and is thought to be the source of the electromagnetic field around the Earth. That field is important in shielding the surface of the planet from some forms of harmful radiation.
- 13.
For a study of the changing probability dynamics as linkage emerges, see Kauffman (1995), ch. 3.
- 14.
That is to say, we don’t think there is any necessary reason why early proto-fish had to have five spines! If we found other animal life forms in the galaxy that all had exactly five digits, then we would have to consider a necessary forcing condition that must have existed in early evolution. On the other hand, some authors argue that the rules of selection are so tight that the fact that vertebrate life forms have five digits means that there was some difference in fitness between four, five, and six. In explicating organization , the mix of necessity (forcing) and path dependence (chance) is a good question to contemplate.
- 15.
For a discussion of such hyper-cycles in the emergence of life , see Kauffman (2000), pp. 120–125.
- 16.
Nanoscale refers to objects measured on the order of a nanometer or one billionth of a meter.
- 17.
See Wikipedia’s page on the citric acid cycle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid_cycle
- 18.
This story of how the society came into being was provided by the PCRS Treasurer Scott M. Hansen. For more information about the PCRS and Puget Creek, see http://www.pugetcreek.org/
- 19.
This is known as the protein folding problem. It has proven nearly intractable except for smaller, more regular polymers of amino acids. Recently, however, some progress may have been made using game programming -style problem solving!
- 20.
Group selection as a mechanism in evolution has been hotly debated. Darwin actually considered it as a valid type of selection that might help explain cooperation in social animals. But since the primacy of the gene theory rose, many evolutionists rejected the idea. Today more evidence has emerged that group selection is a very important selection mechanism underlying the evolution of altruism and cooperation. From a systems science perspective, since the cooperation/competition mechanism is found universally, we can’t imagine it not being operative in human evolution.
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- 22.
In the just-mentioned work of Wolfram and in numerous versions of cellular automata and artificial life , there is often a failure to mention that energy is implicitly being supplied by the computer circuits! Indeed, most of the simulations of these kinds of systems do not include the fact that the computer is being supplied with energy flow continuously, which, along with the energy flows supporting the human designers, is the motive force behind the emergence process . So read these descriptions with some caution. Physical reality must be paid its due.
- 23.
See Wikipedia: Miller, Urey Experiments: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment
- 24.
For the classic study of language and world view, see Whorf (1956). Whorf was the pupil of Edward Sapir, and the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis about how language shapes thought became widely influential in anthropology and many related fields.
Bibliography and Further Reading
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Casti JL (1994) Complexification: explaining a paradoxical world through the science of surprise. HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY
Dawkins R (1976) The selfish gene. Oxford University Press, New York, NY
Deacon TW (1997) The symbolic species: the co-evolution of language and the brain. W. W. Norton and Company, New York, NY
Deacon TW (2012) Incomplete nature: how mind emerged from matter. W. W. Norton and Company, New York, NY
Dennett DC (1995) Darwin’s dangerous idea: evolution and the meaning of life. Simon & Schuster, New York, NY
Edelman G (1987) Neural darwinism: the theory of neuronal group selection. Basic Books, New York, NY
Gleick J (1987) Chaos: making a new science. Penguin Press, New York, NY
Gribbin J (2004) Deep simplicity: bringing order to chaos and complexity. Random House, New York, NY
Holland JH (1998) Emergence: from chaos to order. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., Reading, MA
Kauffman S (1995) At home in the universe: the search for the laws of self-organization and complexity. Oxford University Press, New York, NY
Kauffman S (2000) Investigations. Oxford University Press, New York, NY
Küppers B (1990) Information and the origin of life. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Miller JH, Page SE (2007) Complex adaptive systems: an introduction to computational models of social life. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Mitchell M (2009) Complexity: a guided tour. Oxford University Press, New York, NY
Morowitz HJ (1968) Energy flow in biology: biological organization as a problem in thermal physics. Academic, New York, NY
Morowitz HJ (1992) Beginnings of cellular life: metabolism recapitulates biogenesis. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
Morowitz HJ (2002) The emergence of everything: how the world became complex. Oxford University Press, New York, NY
Nicolis G, Prigogine I (1989) Exploring complexity: an introduction. W. H. Freeman & Company, New York, NY
Prigogine I, Stengers I (1984) Order out of chaos: man’s new dialogue with nature. Bantam Books, New York, NY
Sawyer RK (2005) Social emergence: societies as complex systems. Cambridge University Press, New York, NY
Simon HA (1983) Reason in human affairs. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CT
Wolfram S (2002) A new kind of science. Wolfram Media, Inc., Champaign, IL
Whorf BL (1956) In: Carroll JB (ed) Language thought and reality: selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. MIT Press, Boston, MA
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Mobus, G.E., Kalton, M.C. (2015). Auto-Organization and Emergence. In: Principles of Systems Science. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1920-8_10
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