emergence --- Carlos, your thoughts also make me think about the concept of emergent properties in the sciences. Put as simply as possible for those not familiar with them, emergent properties are attributes of systems made up of many individual parts where the parts alone do not have the property of the collected version. One of my favorite examples is the question "Is a single molecule of water wet?" probably not, wetness is a property that emerges when a sufficiently high number of water molecules are together.

In the context of your thoughts, I often think about how certain scientific disciplines can be seen as emergent from others. Physics studies atoms and forces, but when enough atoms come together and start interacting in new ways, chemistry emerges. When enough sufficiently complex molecules start reproducing and sharing information with their descendent molecules, biology emerges. When biological entities develop social groups, eventually sociology emerges. So forth and so on. So for whatever distinctions we're able to make, there's also ways to find connections because after all that's how branches work. :-)

Source author: Ryan Haupt ryan.haupt@nysf.com