It is seldom discussed, Campos said at the ELSI symposium, but the modern concepts of emergence flow to some extent from dialectics of Hegel, Marx and Engels, as well as the holism of South Africa’s controversial leader and thinker, Jan Smuts.Ĭampos said the “emergence” of today is quite different from those iterations. Its meaning and importance have ebbed and flowed, with a major flowering in the United Kingdom in the 1920s. The term “emergence” comes from the Latin verb emergo which means to arise, to rise up. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, described the concept of philosophical and scientific emergence – though not the word - as going back to the Greeks, at least. Luis Campos, a historian of science at the University of New Mexico and the most recent Baruch S. Heady stuff, which is why the study and use of the concept of emergence has become increasingly widespread as a tool, or perhaps a pathway, to address complex problems.īefore going on, a little history is in order. This doesn’t mean that something magical or divine is going on – rather, that either humans have not figured out what happens or that what happens is not comprehensible given our understanding of the laws of nature and physics. Think of how the firing of the billions of neurons in your brain results in consciousness.Īll create complexity out of component parts, produce something irreducible from those original parts, and all have been resistant to a full explanation using the usual reductionist tools of the scientific world. Think of the processes by which bits of cosmic dust clump and clump and clump millions of times over and in time become a planetesimal or perhaps a planet. Think of the folding of proteins that makes genetic information transfer possible. Think of the combination of hydrogen and oxygen gases which make liquid water. Think of a collection of ants or bees and how they join leaderless by the many thousands to make something – a beehive, an ant colony – that is entirely different from the individual creatures. ![]() The result is generally novel, often surprising, and sometimes most puzzling – especially since emergent phenomena involve self-organization by the more complex whole. So what is “emergence?” Most simply, it describes the ubiquitous and hugely varied mechanisms by which simple components in nature (or in the virtual or philosophical world) achieve more complexity, and in the process become greater than the sum of all those original parts. ![]() And in the 21st century, it is making a significant comeback as a way to think about many phenomena and processes in the world. If there was a simple meaning of the often-used scientific term “emergence,” then 100-plus scientists wouldn’t have spent four days presenting, debating and not infrequently disagreeing about what it was.īut as last month’s organizers of the Earth-Life Science Institute’s “Comparative Emergence” symposium in Tokyo frequently reminded the participants, those debates and disputes are perfectly fine and to be expected given the very long history and fungibility of the concept.Īt the same time, ELSI leaders also clearly thought that the term can have resonance and importance in many domains of science, and that’s why they wanted practitioners to be exposed more deeply to its meanings and powers.Įmergence is a concept commonly used in origins of life research, in complexity and artificial life science less commonly in chemistry, biology, social and planetary sciences and - originally – in philosophy.
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