Condensed concepts

There is no consensus about what emergence is, how to define it, or why it matters. In John Holland ’s beautiful book, Emergence: from Chaos to Order, he states that, “Despite its ubiquity and importance, emergence is an enigmatic, recondite topic, more wondered at than analyzed… It is unlikely that a topic as complicated as emergence will submit meekly to a concise definition, and I have no such to offer.” Instead, Holland focuses on systems that can be described by simple rules or laws. The rules generate complexity: novel patterns that are sometimes hard to recognise and to anticipate.   Below is my own attempt to clarify what some of the important issues and questions are associated with defining emergence. I am trying to take a path that is intermediate between the precision of philosophers and the loose discussion of emergence by condensed matter physicists. My goals are clarity and brevity. A possible definition of emergent properties: novelty Consider a system that is composed

A major challenge for the social sciences is obtaining data that is reliable, gives significant insight, and could be used to test theories. Each week I read  The Economist . Many of their articles feature graphs of social or economic data. To me, some of the graphs are just random noise or show marginal trends that I am not convinced are that significant. But other graphs are quite dramatic or insightful. Previously, I posted  a famous one about smoking. This week I saw the graph below in The New York Times, as part of a long article, Childbirth Is Deadlier for Black Families Even When They’re Rich, Expansive Study Finds , based on this preprint. The data clearly shows the distressing fact that "The richest Black women have infant mortality rates at about the same level as the poorest white women."

Emergence is a concept relevant to a wide range of scientific disciplines, from physics to sociology. Emergence is also at the heart of some of the biggest questions and challenges in each discipline. How might I justify that claim? How do we move beyond "emergence" just being a trendy buzzword? Here I suggest some different facets of a specific discipline that with an emergent perspective may help to understand the discipline and to plan scientific strategy. This post will be primarily descriptive and the next prescriptive. Later I will illustrate both aspects with specific disciplines. Although, some of the facets below may be somewhat obvious, others are profound.  Presence of distinct scales. Scales may involve length, time, or number of components in a system of interest. Different phenomena are observed at different scales. Stratification and separation of scales. Distinct phenomena as usually seen over some range of scale and a distinct stratum can be associated with t