Emergence or self-organization? Look to the soil population

Abstract

Emergence is not well defined, but all emergent systems have the following characteristics. The whole is more than the sum of the parts, they show bottom-up rather top-down organization and, if biological, they involve chemical signalling. Self-organization can be understood in terms of the second and third stages of thermodynamics enabling these stages used as analogues of ecosystem functioning. The second stage system was suggested earlier to provide a useful analogue of the behaviour of natural and agricultural ecosystems subjected to perturbations, but for this it needs the capacity for self-organization. Considering the hierarchy of the ecosystem suggests that this self-organization is provided by the third stage, whose entropy maximization acts as an analogue of that of the soil population when it releases small molecules from much larger molecules in dead plant matter. This it does as vigorously as conditions allow. Through this activity, the soil population confers self-organization at both the ecosystem and the global level. The soil population has been seen as both emergent and self-organizing, supporting the suggestion that the two concepts are are so closely linked as to be virtually interchangeable. If this idea is correct one of the characteristics of a biological emergent system seems to be the ability to confer self-organization on an ecosystem or other entity which may be larger than itself. The beehive and the termite colony are emergent systems which share this ability.

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Acknowledgements

Nigel Bird persuaded me to write the paper that became reference 3 and, while refereeing it, John Crawford drew my attention to references 1, 6 and 7. Sarah Kemmitt told me about quorum sensing. I am grateful to all three. Rothamsted Research receives grant-in-aid from the Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council of the UK.

Figures and Tables

Table 1 Examples of emergence

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