Tuesday, March 26, 2024

What Are Emergent Properties In Biology

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What Is Emergence In Sociology

1.1 Emergent Properties

The emergence of sociology as a discipline of academic interest is of recent origin. Its emergence as a discipline can be attributed to the vast changes that took place in the nineteenth century. Various strains and tendencies, some intellectual and some social, combined to-form the science of sociology.

Vimodelling Emergence A New Challenge For Ecology

Landscape ecology , aimed at identifying emergent properties without an a priori hypothesis, failed to reveal true, integrated systems because of its own operational concepts, favouring patterns over processes and holism over reductionism . When tautologically based on sophisticated methods or theories, science may drive us up blind alleys . Instead, in a more modest manner, we should in a first explanatory step let patterns emerge from our observation of the real world , discern emergent properties, and only then investigate underlying processes by experimental and theoretical methods. Today, this is not the mainstream of scientific practice, which creates theory as a first, decisive step. However, it could well move into prominence in the near future, if and when interest in more realistic approaches increases.

Emergent Properties In Natural World

Emergent properties can be easily found in all sorts of fields, from physics , cybernetics, and artificial intelligence, to language, social science, and music. However, it is most easily illustrated with examples from natural world. For instance, in chemistry, our knowledge of the individual properties of sodium, which is a metal, and chlorine, which is a gas, does not allow us to predict the emergent properties of these two elements, which is a sodium chloridea table salt.

In biology, our knowledge about individual brain cellsneuronsdoes not allow us to predict emergent properties of cell combinations, such as memory. As one biologist asked rhetorically, could the behavior of a cheetah chasing a deer be predicted from knowledge about the atoms and molecules making up these animals?

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What Are Emergent Properties Examples

emergent propertiespropertiesExamplesemergent properties

. Likewise, what is the definition of emergent properties in biology?

An emergent property is a property which a collection or complex system has, but which the individual members do not have. In biology, for example, heart is made of heart cells, heart cells on their own don’t have the property of pumping blood.

Furthermore, what is an example of emergence? Nature offers many familiar examples of emergence, Humans have created many more. But much emergent behavior is due to persistent changes to the local environment. Sand dunes, termite mounds, and cities are persistent physical structures that organize the behavior of the very entities that build them.

Subsequently, one may also ask, what are the emergent properties of life?

Emergent Properties at the Molecular LevelSmaller parts combine to make increasingly complex systems. An emergent property is a characteristic an entity gains when it becomes part of a bigger system. Emergent properties help living organisms better adapt to their environments and increase their chances of survival.

What is the emergent?

emergent. Emergent is an adjective that describes something that is emerging, or suddenly coming into existence. Emergent means coming into being. It’s often used in phrases like emergent technologies. These are brand-new technologies that we can expect to be widely used in the near future.

What Are Examples Of Emergence

1.1 Emergent Properties

Examples of emergent behavior are everywhere around us from birds flocking fireflies synchronizing ants colonizing fish schooling individuals self-organizing into neighborhoods in cities all with no leaders or central control to the Big Bang the formation of galaxies and stars and planets the evolution of

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Hierarchical Organization And Emergent Properties

Biological systems have a hierarchy of organizational levels that extends from molecules and cells to individual organisms, populations and ecosystems. Every individual plant and animal is a collection of cells every population is a collection of individual organisms of the same species and every ecosystem consists of populations of different species. The most important levels of biological organization for human ecology are populations and ecosystems.

Each level of biological organization from molecules to ecosystems has characteristic behaviours which emerge at that level. These distinct behaviours, called emergent properties, function synergistically at each level of organization to give that level a life of its own which is greater than the sum of its parts. This happens because all the parts fit together in ways that allow the system as a whole to function in a manner that promotes its survival. Because the parts are interconnected, the behaviour of every part is shaped by feedback loops through the rest of the system. A mixture of positive and negative feedback promotes growth and change in the system as a whole.

The story of forest fire protection provides an example of counterintuitive behaviour in ecosystems. Forest managers tried to reduce fire damage by putting out fires. The result was even more fire damage. Details of this story are in Chapter 6.

What Is An Emergent Property

The Short AnswerAn emergent property is a function that originates from interactions between atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, organs, or organ systems. For example, many organs interact with one another to form the digestive system. When all these organs are put together, food can be digested, absorbed, and eliminated from the body. The function of the digestive system therefore emerges when the individual organs interact.

The Long Answer

You might recall that all life composed of atoms, molecules, and cells. Atoms unite to form molecules, and molecules combine to form the structures of the cell. Multicellular organisms have many cells that interact to form tissues. Tissues interact as well, forming organs that work together in organ systems. Let us consider the digestive system of a human , starting with its smallest component. At each step well write one new property that emerges.

Atoms: The digestive system has countless atoms. Many of them are carbon and hydrogen.

Molecules: Atoms bond with one another. The digestive system has many phospholipid molecules, which are attracted to water on one side and repel water on the other. An emergent property between atoms and molecules is the attraction and repulsion to water.

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Emergent Properties In Cities

The complex social organization of human beings also exhibits certain emergent properties. Social scientists and urban planners often point to cities as the clearest example of emergence in human interaction. They study how certain areas of a city tend to develop similar economic or social activities and gradually become specialized hubs from theater districts to large fish markets. Especially in the case of activities that are not controlled by zoning regulations, the decision of one individual to conduct a certain activity in a certain place tends to make similar or complementary activities in the vicinity more feasible. If one person opens a theater on a street, the area begins to be frequented by people looking for cultural activities, until the street attracts art galleries and schools and gradually becomes a cultural district. No single person makes the decision to generate a cultural center, but the confluence of interests creates the space through emergent properties.

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Emergent Properties Of Social Systems

Emergent Properties | What is This Thing?

Emergent properties of the human social system are important for human ecology because they shape the ways in which people interact with ecosystems. One emergent property is distortion of information when errors accumulate as information passes through a social network. This emergent property underlies the party game of telephone, which starts by giving a secret message to one person in a group. That person whispers the message to a second person, and the message is whispered from one person to another. After everyone has been told the message, the first person and last person tell everyone the message as they understood it. To everyones amusement, the last persons version of the message is typically incorrect in many ways, even though the last person is not a liar.

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Challenges To Its Viability

This section introduces two commonly pressed challenges to thein-principle viability of weak emergence. The accounts of weakemergence in the subsequent section are partly motivated as ways ofmeeting one or both of the challenges.

3.1.1 From parsimony

The simplest challenge to weak emergence is from parsimony, and it canbe pressed from the side of reductionism or anti-realism or from the opposing side of strong emergentism. The weak emergentistgrants that the ontology and dynamical laws of a completed, truephysics metaphysically determine all fundamental physical facts,and that the latter metaphysically determine allnon-fundamental facts or associated truths about the world. In thatcase, why add to the ontology of the world? Why not parsimoniouslyrest with the lower-level physical ontology, and offer a deflationaryaccount of truths that appear to refer to higher-levelphenomena? One might, e.g., construe the phenomena as coarse-grainedpatterns running through the world of fundamental physical phenomena,and regard truths invoking concepts such as cell,metabolism, cat, and desire as referring to distinctive types of arrangements ofunderlying physical entities and their qualities. This stance cangrant that in practice we cannot dispense with special scientificclaims. But such broadly pragmatic considerationsshould not guide our views concerning the worlds ontology blocking such deflationary moves requires a stronger form of autonomythan physicalism allows.

Is Color An Emergent Property

Colors are, in a sense, emergent properties related to our biology, at the same time, they exist as common concepts and are mutually agreeable identities of visual perception, all be it not as far as their connotations are concerned, which are social constructs instead which in turn exist as such.

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Why Is Movement Not A Characteristic Of Life

Their options for responding to their environment are to die or to acclimatize in place. Purposeful movement is certainly not the defining characteristic of life. Things that move in response to stimuli are alive, but not all living things move in response to stimuli. In other words, its sufficient, but not necessary.

What Are The Seven Emergent Properties Associated With Life

Biology as the Study of Life

Emergent Properties at the Molecular Level

Emergent Properties at the Molecular LevelSmaller parts combine to make increasingly complex systems. An emergent property is a characteristic an entity gains when it becomes part of a bigger system. Emergent properties help living organisms better adapt to their environments and increase their chances of survival.

Secondly, what are the 7 themes of life? Terms in this set

  • Cellular Structure and Function. All organisms are composed of one or more cells.
  • Reproduction. All living organisms can reproduce.
  • Metabolism. All living organisms require energy that they obtain while carrying out various chemical reactions.
  • Homeostasis.
  • Interdependence.

Furthermore, what are some examples of emergent properties?

In other words, emergent properties are properties of a group of items, whether insects, atoms or buildings, that you would not find in any of the individual items. Examples of emergent properties include cities, the brain, ant colonies and complex chemical systems.

How do you remember the 7 properties of life?

For example, a really common mnemonic device used in biology is MRS GREN. This acronym is used to help us remember the 7 characteristics of life .

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What Is An Example Of Emergence

Nature offers many familiar examples of emergence, Humans have created many more. But much emergent behavior is due to persistent changes to the local environment. Sand dunes, termite mounds, and cities are persistent physical structures that organize the behavior of the very entities that build them.

What Are Emergent Properties Definition And Examples

Daniel NelsonPRO INVESTOR

Emergent properties are properties that manifest themselves as the result of various system components working together, not as a property of any individual component.

To put that another way, it is a property that a complex system or collection of system parts has, but which individual parts do not possess.

The term is used within systems theory, science, philosophy, and even creative mediums and it encapsulates the idiom of something being greater than the sum of its parts. Since emergent properties are viewable at more macro levels of analysis, only examining individual parts of the system will prevent one from seeing emergent properties. Examples of emergent properties include biochemical systems, the brain, and ant colonies.

Lets take a closer look at some examples of emergent properties and discuss how the property only manifests itself at the correct level of analysis.

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In Religion Art And Humanities

In religion, emergence grounds expressions of religious naturalism and syntheism in which a sense of the sacred is perceived in the workings of entirely naturalistic processes by which more complex forms arise or evolve from simpler forms. Examples are detailed in The Sacred Emergence of Nature by Ursula Goodenough& Terrence Deacon and Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffman, both from 2006, and in Syntheism â Creating God in The Internet Age by Alexander Bard& from 2014. An early argument for the emergence of social formations, in part stemming from religion, can be found in Max Weber‘s most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Recently, the emergence of a new social system is linked with the emergence of order from nonlinear relationships among multiple interacting units, where multiple interacting units are individual thoughts, consciousness, and actions.

In international development, concepts of emergence have been used within a theory of social change termed SEED-SCALE to show how standard principles interact to bring forward socio-economic development fitted to cultural values, community economics, and natural environment . These principles can be implemented utilizing a sequence of standardized tasks that self-assemble in individually specific ways utilizing recursive evaluative criteria.

About Daniel Nelson Pro Investor

Emergent Properties | Cell Biology

Daniel obtained his BS and is pursuing a Master’s degree in the science of Human-Computer Interaction. He hopes to work on projects which bridge the sciences and humanities. His background in education and training is diverse including education in computer science, communication theory, psychology, and philosophy. He aims to create content that educates, persuades, entertains and inspires.

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Affects On Living Things

A common emergent property is population interdependence. Humans and ants, for example, are both independent organisms. They function autonomously, each individual controlling its own bodily systems and actions, but both are essentially unable to survive without other members of their own species. Many species require other members of their species to reproduce, and most species evolve not as single individuals but as whole populations, slowly inheriting new traits that benefit the larger group.

References

Strong And Weak Emergence

Usage of the notion “emergence” may generally be subdivided into two perspectives, that of “weak emergence” and “strong emergence”. One paper discussing this division is Weak Emergence, by philosopher . In terms of physical systems, weak emergence is a type of emergence in which the emergent property is amenable to computer simulation or similar forms of after-the-fact analysis . Crucial in these simulations is that the interacting members retain their independence. If not, a new entity is formed with new, emergent properties: this is called strong emergence, which it is argued cannot be simulated or analysed.

Some common points between the two notions are that emergence concerns new properties produced as the system grows, which is to say ones which are not shared with its components or prior states. Also, it is assumed that the properties are supervenient rather than metaphysically primitive.

Weak emergence describes new properties arising in systems as a result of the interactions at an elemental level. However, Bedau stipulates that the properties can be determined only by observing or simulating the system, and not by any process of a reductionist analysis. As a consequence the emerging properties are scale dependent: they are only observable if the system is large enough to exhibit the phenomenon. Chaotic, unpredictable behaviour can be seen as an emergent phenomenon, while at a microscopic scale the behaviour of the constituent parts can be fully deterministic.

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Examples Of Emergent Properties

Ant Colonies

One of the easiest examples of emergent properties to grasp is ant colonies. If one were to continually observe a single ant, the ant would seem to move around with little purpose and accomplish very little. However, when one observes the actions of the colony as a whole, it is clear how the many ants working together are able to accomplish an impressive variety of tasks. Many multiple ants working together can build dams and mounds and transfer large amounts of food from one area to another. The emergent property appears as the result of many ants being organized together.

Imagine what humans could do, if we all worked together like an ant colony minus the queen. Justin D. Hill

If one ant finds a food source, it secretes substances that act as chemical markers and bring other ants to the same place to break the food source down and return it to the colony. So while an individual ant may only grab a small crumb of food, together the ants form an efficient machine capable of following one another to the food source, disassembling it, and returning it to the colony a machine/system created to accomplish this task is one example of an emergent property.

The Brain/Human Consciousness

Chemistry

Cities

Cities arent like people they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea. John Updike

Bird Flocks

Birds of a feather flock together. Proverb

Video Games

Emergent Properties And Processes

Cell Theory

An emergent behavior or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviors as a collective. If emergence happens over disparate size scales, then the reason is usually a causal relation across different scales. In other words, there is often a form of top-down feedback in systems with emergent properties. The processes causing emergent properties may occur in either the observed or observing system, and are commonly identifiable by their patterns of accumulating change, generally called ‘growth’. Emergent behaviours can occur because of intricate causal relations across different scales and feedback, known as interconnectivity. The emergent property itself may be either very predictable or unpredictable and unprecedented, and represent a new level of the system’s evolution. The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviour in the lower-level entities. The shape and behaviour of a flock of birds or school of fish are good examples of emergent properties.

Systems with emergent properties or emergent structures may appear to defy entropic principles and the second law of thermodynamics, because they form and increase order despite the lack of command and central control. This is possible because open systems can extract information and order out of the environment.

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