Emergence and Self-Organization in Chemistry and Biology

David Newth; John Finnigan

doi:10.1071/CH06292

RESEARCH FRONT

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Emergence and Self-Organization in Chemistry and Biology

David Newth ^A ^B and John Finnigan ^A

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

^A CSIRO Centre for Complex Systems Science, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia.

^B Corresponding author. Email: david.newth@csiro.au

David Newth received his honours degree in Applied Science in 1998 followed by a Ph.D. in 2002 in computer science from Charles Sturt University. He lectured at Charles Sturt University in complex systems, data modelling, and computer programming from 2003 to 2004. He began working as a research scientist with the CSIRO Centre for Complex Systems in 2004. His research interests include complex network, massive agent-based models calibrated by data, theoretical biology, and game theory.

John Finnigan received his B.Sc. from the University of Manchester in 1968 and his Ph.D. from the Australian National University in 1978. From 1989 to 1995 he was Head of the CSIRO Centre for Environmental Mechanics, and a Chief Research Scientist at the CSIRO Divisions of Land and Water and, later, Atmospheric Research. He is an Honorary Professor at the School of Geophysical Sciences, University of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. Since 2001 he has been the Director of the CSIRO Centre for Complex Systems Science. His research interests include atmospheric science, from detailed fluid dynamics to the role of biosphereâ€“atmosphere exchange in climate dynamics, and complex systems science. In particular he is engaged in research on the ways that human decision making and societal dynamics can be captured quantitatively in models of the earth's systems.

Australian Journal of Chemistry 59(12) 841-848 https://doi.org/10.1071/CH06292
Submitted: 14 August 2006 Accepted: 20 November 2006 Published: 20 December 2006

Abstract

Complex systems display two key properties that distinguish them from systems that are merely very, very complicated: emergence and self-organization. Emergence is the appearance of behaviour at system level that is not implicit in the properties of the system’s components; self-organization implies the increase of a system’s internal order without the imposition of external control. Competing definitions of emergence and self-organization have led to confusion. Here, we follow the idea proposed by Anderson, that emergence and self-organization are signalled by symmetry-breaking. In general, a steady-state configuration of matter must exhibit the same symmetries as the equations that govern its dynamics. However, while this might apply to the component parts of a system in isolation, the whole system might display less symmetry because of the interactions between its individual parts. Here, we will explore several systems where microscopic symmetry is broken by the interaction between the component parts of the system. These examples show that macroscopic symmetry-breaking is an important factor in the formation of system level order from chemical reactions through to the organization of ecosystems.

References

^A A Noether’s theorem strictly applies to Lie group transformations of systems described by a Lagrangian and it was first developed to resolve problems in energy conservation in general relativity. It is most easily derived in the framework of classical mechanics although physics students often meet it first in courses in quantum field theory where its analogue, the Ward–Takahashi identities, yield the conservation of electric charge.

Emergence and Self-Organization in Chemistry and Biology

Abstract

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