Emergence

the arising of Complexity via Self Organizing rather than Top Down Design?

book by Steven Johnson ISBN:0684868768

interview - Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts. It's what happens when you have a system of relatively simple-minded component parts - often there are thousands or millions of them - and they interact in relatively simple ways. And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up.