Serendip's Complexity and Emergence On-Line Forum

Dr Dawn,
to understand the difference between emergence or self-organization and design think of a machine vs a biological system. The machine is designed and built to serve a purpose. A bicycle has two wheels, a seat, pedals, and handlebars to carry a person over the ground. A school of fish is self-organized. As all the school moves and changes direction at the same instance, it moves as if all the fish are of one mind. But they aren't, each fish is acting and influencing each of their neighbours simultaneously. There is no leader or conscious mind directing. This is self-organization.

Consider how everything is related to everything else. All creatures are related to each other. We all are made up of cells, we all derive initially from a single cell and develop into embyros, we all have nervous systems, and circulatory systems. Our cells share the same organelles and do the same sorts of things as the cells in all other creatures. We all, without a single exception, use DNA and RNA to reproduce.

Machines come in all shapes and sizes and are built of all sorts of materials. They are not organically related to each other the way living things are. The fact that RNA and DNA are used by all living creatures to reproduce means that we are all related to a single original cell. That cell had DNA and was able to reproduce itself.

If you look inside machines, you will see parts that were designed and built to interact in a way that serves the purpose of the machine. the feet put pressure on the pedal which turns the wheels round, etc.

If we were able to look inside our bodies, we would see groups of cells interacting in a self-organizing manner. Cells combine and separate, they interact and communicate, they influence each other. There is no planner or designer involved. You can be asleep and your heart keeps pumping, and your lungs keep breathing, and your cells grow in number.

Biological systems are self-organizing but machines are never internally self-organizing because they are designed and built purposefully. Humans have lots of different purposes and reasons for building machines. Reproduction must have originally been a form of self-organization that replicated itself, so that it maintained it's continued existence.

All living things act purposively to maintain themselves and reproduce progeny. They do this by taking energy from the sun or indirectly consuming it. Humans with language and consciousness, have discovered new forms of energy which have allowed us to greatly enlarge the number and the range of our purposes. These purposes have become temporarily globally dominant. But their very dominance is the route of human downfall. By overriding the rest of life we are undermining life's ability through it's self-organization, to support our existence.