www.istockphoto.com

On Big Picture Science, a podcast/radio program that airs on public radio stations nationwide, in a program on emergence and self organization, SFI Research Fellow Simon DeDeo explains how emergence abounds not only in nature, but also in human social systems.

"Emergence is ... something so common that we almost don't even notice it happening around us," DeDeo says. In social systems, for example, "we can look at the emergence of political parties. But what is a political party? In some sense, an individual, a supporter, plays somewhat the same role as a neuron does in the human brain."

Individuals within the party don't have a lot of power to shift its platforms, he says, "but the collective behavior of all of us in that party and the way we interact within that party somehow lead to a set of emergent rules that we call political science. That kind of separation -- the separation between, for example, what we would call in physics the microphysics of system and the macroscale behavior, the way in which those two things split apart, that's the basic story of emergence."

He goes on to explain why emergence in both kinds of systems is likely a process driven by evolutionary advantage.

Other program guests included new Nobel laureate and molecular and cell biologist Randy Schekman (UC Berkeley), neurobiologist Steve Potter (Georgia Institute of Technology), biological anthropologist Terence Deacon (UC Berkeley), and computer scientist Leslie Valiant (Harvard). 

Listen to or download the Emergence episode of Big Picture Science (October 14, 2013)