Anders response

Duncan Watts starts his article with a series of questions. I really like this manner of writing as it capture my attention straight away. I want to know the answer of these questions. All his questions are the same version of one question; “How does individual behaviour aggregate to collective behaviour?” Watts suggests that sometimes the bigger mass is easier to understand than the complicated individual itself, as long as you ignore the more complicated individual details. Knowing the behaviour of the individuals does not necessary help us understanding the way of the group. At the levels of groups, systems and populations a new phenomena can emerge. Individuals in a large system can generate greater complexity than the individuals themselves.

Jane Jacobs uses the city as the principle of emergence. “Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity” Jacobs writes (p433). She goes on and refers to Dr Weaver who suggests that cities consist of a number of situations all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways. Jane Jacobs implies this reasoning to city planning and recognizes the problem of just looking at a few factors individual instead of looking at the city and reasoning from particulars to the general (rather than reverse).

Gould and Lewontin writes in their critique of the adaptationist programme that organisms must be analysed as integrated wholes. They further points out that in an integrated whole the “constraints themselves (between individuals) become more interesting and more important in delimiting pathways of change than the selective force that may mediate change when it occurs”.

So, in trying to end my response in the manner Watts starts his article, with a question: Is an emergent system something that is created with a number of individual parts that together form a more complicated whole? Or is it just a mass of whatever, together in a system?