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).

References

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

• 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.