On Emergence

Too Long; Didn't Read

<span>S</span>ome concepts in nature are harder for us humans to understand than others. How complex things can emerge out of simple ones is one of those concepts. An termite colony, for instance, has a complex cooling system in its lower levels. No single termite knows how it works. Completely unaware of the end results they build complex mounds and nests, shelter tubes to protect their paths and networks of subterranean tunnels to connect their “cities”. Everything seems organized and designed but it is not. Evolution has equipped the termite with a pheromone receptor that tells the termite what task he should engage in by simply counting the amount of neighboring termites doing the same thing. If there’s a surplus of workers they become warriors and so on. Complex structures emerge from simple rules. The fractal patterns found all around nature is another example. Fractals look complex but in reality they’re not. They’re basically algorithms. The same pattern, repeated over and over again with a slightly modified starting point. The human brain is an excellent example of a complex thing evolved out of simpler things and we humans still have a hard time accepting that it wasn’t designed. Religions, which themselves are emergent systems spawned out of human interaction, have come up with a plethora of explanations for how we came to be. All sorts of wild origin stories have been more widely accepted than the simple explanation that our complexities just emerged out of simpler things following a set of rules that nature itself provided for them.