Emergence

Termite mound: Example of an emergence system.
(borrowed from getintravel.com)

The book I read for book club this month touched on something called emergence. And because it's so interesting to me I thought instead of trying to incorporate it into my book review I'd write a separate blog about.
Emergence has come up briefly in a couple other books I've read recently, and I'm pretty fascinated by it at the moment.(Like I was with strange attractors a couple years ago;) But what is it? To borrow the definition from Wikipedia emergence is:
"...the way complex systems and patters arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple reactions."
What this means is that in many systems patterns will begin to emerge that could not be predicted beforehand by looking at any single component of the whole system. Saying it another way, emergence is the production of a pattern or a complex systems by many individual components that could never create anything on their own. Moreover, the system cannot work unless all of the components are in place. It's slightly more complicated than just that, since to create emergent properties a specific amount of energy must be added to the system, but I'll try to explain that below. This is a really cool thing, so I'm going to take a minute to give a couple examples.
Sand ripples: If you look at the components that form sand ripples in the bottom of a lake or ocean you have: Water, wave action (i.e. your energy source), and sand grains. If you  look closely at a sand grain, or a molecule of water, it is unlikely that you could predict how they could ever organize themselves into coherent rows of ripples. But they do. The thing is, they only do it when the right amount of energy (i.e. waves) are present. Too little energy and they will not form. Too much (think big crashing storm waves) and the ripples will be destroyed. But just the right amount, and suddenly sand grains can organize themselves into ripple patterns. Cool right?
Termite nests: This works for hives as well. The components to these systems are earth and millions of individual insects. The energy to the system is how much work each individual can do. Now if you took a single termite and inspected it closely you'd never guess that it could build a mound twenty feet tall. It doesn't even know how to "build"! And you'd be right, a single termite can't build a mound. Even several hundred couldn't, but a few million can, and do. A bunch of individually simple termites can build gigantic mounds taller than a giraffe!
The human brain: Same thing. Your components are individual neurons, and of course the energy comes from the food you eat. If you look at a single neuron you can see how it basically works, but it can't create complex thought...or even simple thought for that matter. All it can do is send and receive chemical signals. You can't make a "sort of brain" with a few hundred neurons. You need a whole skull full of them, all connected together, to be able to think, and learn and know. A brain is not a neuron, a brain is an intricately connected assemblage of many neurons that when acting together produce thoughts and regulate body functions.
So why is this important and interesting to me? This subject of emergence is critical for the transition from non-living to living. The primary reason being that it explains how the evolution of life was able to occur and not conflict with the second law of thermodynamics (i.e.entropy of a system never decreases). To be clear, technically nothing gets around the second law, so ultimately everything does increase in entropy. But small isolated systems like termite mounds, or shallow shore lines, or human brains, can under the right circumstances, for a time, produce amazing and complex things. Using only specific quantities of energy, and relatively simple parts amazing patterns and functions quite literally emerge! I think that is so cool.
Anyway, I'm probably not explaining this super well, but it's my hope that if you find this subject interesting, you will look it up and do some reading on your own! I am sure there are authors out there who have done a much better job than me. On is Dr. Robert Hazen who wrote the book Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin that I read for book club this month.