Self-organization

In biology, 'self-organization' refers to the process whereby structural and behavioral order, or pattern, arises spontaneously at more and more global levels in a living system, a consequence of the interactions among more local, lower-level components of the system, those lower-level interactions the result of local physicochemical processes (Camazine et al. 2001). Some biologists consider self-organization as the fundamental basis of the order that emerges in living systems (Kauffman 1993, 1995).

In living systems, self-organization gives rise to a variety of global patterns, both hierarchically within the system and for the system as a whole, as well as among living systems, a variety upon which natural selection can operate to assess fitness of the system and its subsystems to environmental conditions — the interaction of self-organization and natural selection reciprocal in nature and, through evolution, determining of the global pattern of the biological world (Depew and Weber 1995; Batten et al. 2008).

Order and pattern can emerge through self-organization in the inanimate world as well as the animate world, in particular in far-from-equilibrium open thermodynamic systems with physicochemically interacting components, systems such as galaxies and tornados, cloud formation and crystal growth (Haken 2008) and perhaps the cosmos itself (Smolin 1998). Computer scientists have developed methodologies and applications for software with self-organizing properties (Brueckner et al. 2005).

References

• Batten D, Salthe S, Boschetti F. (2008) Self-organization Proposes What Natural Selection Disposes. Biological Theory 3(1):17-29.

• Brueckner SV, Serugendo GDM, Karageorgos A, Nagpal R. (editors) (2005) Engineering self-organising systems: methodologies and applications. Volume 3464 of Lecture notes in computer science, State-of-the-art survey, Lecture notes in artificial intelligence. Springer. ISBN 9783540261803. | Google Books preview.

• Camazine S, Deneubourg J-L, Franks NR, Sneyd J, Theraulaz G, Bonabeau E. (2001) Self-Organization in Biological Systems. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. | Google Books preview.

• Depew D, Weber B. (1995) Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. | Amazon review and 'Look Inside'.

• Haken H. (2008) Self-organization. Scholarpedia, 3(8):1401.

• Kauffman S. (1993) The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. | Google Books preview.

• Kauffman S. (1995) At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Complexity. New York: Oxford University Press. | Google Books preview.

• Smolin L. (1998) The Life of the Cosmos. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195126648. | Google Books preview.