Self-organization, also called spontaneous order in the social sciences, is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spontaneous when sufficient energy is available, not needing control by any external agent. It is often triggered by seemingly random fluctuations, amplified by positive feedback. The resulting organization is wholly decentralized, distributed over all the components of the system. As such, the organization is typically robust and able to survive or self-repair substantial perturbation. Chaos theory discusses self-organization in terms of islands of predictability in a sea of chaotic unpredictability.
Self-organization is a phenomenon that occurs across various fields, including physics, chemistry, biology, collective behavior, ecology, communication networks, robotics, artificial intelligence, linguistics, social science, urbanism, philosophy, and engineering. Examples of self-organization include crystallization, thermal convection of fluids, chemical oscillation, animal swarming, neural circuits, and black markets.
Overview Self-organization is realizedGlansdorff, P., Prigogine, I. (1971). Thermodynamic Theory of Structure, Stability and Fluctuations, London: Wiley-Interscience in the physics of non-equilibrium processes, and in chemical reactions, where it is often characterized as self-assembly. The concept has proven useful in biology, from the molecular to the ecosystem level.Compare: Cited examples of self-organizing behavior also appear in the literature of many other disciplines, both in the natural sciences and in the social sciences (such as economics or anthropology). Self-organization has also been observed in mathematical systems such as cellular automata. Self-organization is an example of the related concept of emergence.
Self-organization relies on four basic ingredients: strong dynamical non-linearity, often (though not necessarily) involving positive and negative feedback balance of exploitation and exploration multiple interactions among components availability of energy (to overcome the natural tendency toward entropy, or loss of free energy)
Principles The cybernetician William Ross Ashby formulated the original principle of self-organization in 1947.Ashby, W. R. (1962). "Principles of the self-organizing system", pp. 255–78 in Principles of Self-Organization. Heinz von Foerster and George W. Zopf, Jr. (eds.) U.S. Office of Naval Research. It states that any deterministic dynamic system automatically evolves towards a state of equilibrium that can be described in terms of an attractor in a basin of surrounding states. Once there, the further evolution of the system is constrained to remain in the attractor. This constraint implies a form of mutual dependency or coordination between its constituent components or subsystems. In Ashby's terms, each subsystem has adapted to the environment formed by all other subsystems.
The cybernetician Heinz von Foerster formulated the principle of "order from noise" in 1960.Von Foerster, H. (1960). "On self-organizing systems and their environments", pp. 31–50 in Self-organizing systems. M.C. Yovits and S. Cameron (eds.), Pergamon Press, London It notes that self-organization is facilitated by random perturbations ("noise") that let the system explore a variety of states in its state space. This increases the chance that the system will arrive into the basin of a "strong" or "deep" attractor, from which it then quickly enters the attractor itself. The biophysicist Henri Atlan developed this concept by proposing the principle of "complexity from noise"See occurrences on Google Books. ()See occurrences on Google Books. first in the 1972 book L'organisation biologique et la théorie de l'information and then in the 1979 book Entre le cristal et la fumée. The physicist and chemist Ilya Prigogine formulated a similar principle as "order through fluctuations"Nicolis, G. and Prigogine, I. (1977). Self-organization in nonequilibrium systems: From dissipative structures to order through fluctuations. Wiley, New York. or "order out of chaos".Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. (1984). Order out of chaos: Man's new dialogue with nature. Bantam Books. It is applied in the method of simulated annealing for problem solving and machine learning.
History
The idea that the dynamics of a system can lead to an increase in its organization has a long history. The ancient atomists such as Democritus and Lucretius believed that a designing intelligence is unnecessary to create order in nature, arguing that given enough time and space and matter, order emerges by itself.
The philosopher René Descartes presents self-organization hypothetically in the fifth part of his 1637 Discourse on Method. He elaborated on the idea in his unpublished work The World.
Immanuel Kant used the term "self-organizing" in his 1790 Critique of Judgment, where he argued that teleology is a meaningful concept only if there exists such an entity whose parts or "organs" are simultaneously ends and means. Such a system of organs must be able to behave as if it has a mind of its own, that is, it is capable of governing itself.
Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) and Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888) discovered the second law of thermodynamics in the 19th century. It states that total entropy, sometimes understood as disorder, will always increase over time in an isolated system. This means that a system cannot spontaneously increase its order without an external relationship that decreases order elsewhere in the system (e.g. through consuming the low-entropy energy of a battery and diffusing high-entropy heat).Carnot, S. (1824/1986). Reflections on the motive power of fire, Manchester University Press, Manchester, Translated into English:
18th-century thinkers had sought to understand the "universal laws of form" to explain the observed forms of living organisms. This idea became associated with Lamarckism and fell into disrepute until the early 20th century, when D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860–1948) attempted to revive it.
The psychiatrist and engineer W. Ross Ashby introduced the term "self-organizing" to contemporary science in 1947. It was taken up by the cyberneticians Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask, Stafford Beer; and von Foerster organized a conference on "The Principles of Self-Organization" at the University of Illinois' Allerton Park in June, 1960 which led to a series of conferences on Self-Organizing Systems.Asaro, P. (2007). "Heinz von Foerster and the Bio-Computing Movements of the 1960s" in Albert Müller and Karl H. Müller (eds.) An Unfinished Revolution? Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory BCL 1958–1976. Vienna, Austria: Edition Echoraum. Norbert Wiener took up the idea in the second edition of his Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1961).
Self-organization was associated with general systems theory in the 1960s, but did not become commonplace in the scientific literature until physicists Hermann Haken et al. and complex systems researchers adopted it in a greater picture from cosmology Erich Jantsch, chemistry with dissipative system, biology and sociology as autopoiesis to system thinking in the following 1980s (Santa Fe Institute) and 1990s (complex adaptive system), until our days with the disruptive emerging technologies profounded by a rhizomatic network theory.As an indication of the increasing importance of this concept, when queried with the keyword self-organ*, Dissertation Abstracts finds nothing before 1954, and only four entries before 1970. There were 17 in the years 1971–1980; 126 in 1981–1990; and 593 in 1991–2000.
Around 2008–2009, a concept of guided self-organization started to take shape. This approach aims to regulate self-organization for specific purposes, so that a dynamical system may reach specific attractors or outcomes. The regulation constrains a self-organizing process within a complex system by restricting local interactions between the system components, rather than following an explicit control mechanism or a global design blueprint. The desired outcomes, such as increases in the resultant internal structure and/or functionality, are achieved by combining task-independent global objectives with task-dependent constraints on local interactions.Phys.org, Self-organizing robots: Robotic construction crew needs no foreman (w/ video), February 13, 2014.Science Daily, Robotic systems: How sensorimotor intelligence may develop... self-organized behaviors , October 27, 2015.
By field
Physics
The many self-organizing phenomena in physics include phase transitions and spontaneous symmetry breaking such as spontaneous magnetization and crystal growth in classical physics, and the laser,Zeiger, H. J. and Kelley, P. L. (1991) "Lasers", pp. 614–19 in The Encyclopedia of Physics, Second Edition, edited by Lerner, R. and Trigg, G., VCH Publishers. superconductivity and Bose–Einstein condensation in quantum physics. Self-organization is found in self-organized criticality in dynamical systems, in tribology, in spin foam systems, and in loop quantum gravity,Ansari M. H. (2004) Self-organized theory in quantum gravity. arxiv.org in plasma, in river basins and deltas, in dendritic solidification (snow flakes), in capillary imbibition and in turbulent structure.
Chemistry
Self-organization in chemistry includes drying-induced self-assembly, molecular self-assembly, reaction–diffusion systems and oscillating reactions, autocatalytic networks, liquid crystals, grid complexes, colloidal crystals, self-assembled monolayers, micelles, microphase separation of block copolymers, and Langmuir–Blodgett films.
Biology
Self-organization in biologyCamazine, Deneubourg, Franks, Sneyd, Theraulaz, Bonabeau, Self-Organization in Biological Systems, Princeton University Press, 2003. can be observed in spontaneous folding of proteins and other biomacromolecules, self-assembly of lipid bilayer membranes, pattern formation and morphogenesis in developmental biology, the coordination of human movement, eusocial behavior in insects (bees, ants, termites) and mammals, and flocking behavior in birds and fish.
The mathematical biologist Stuart Kauffman and other structuralists have suggested that self-organization may play roles alongside natural selection in three areas of evolutionary biology, namely population dynamics, molecular evolution, and morphogenesis. However, this does not take into account the essential role of energy in driving biochemical reactions in cells. The systems of reactions in any cell are self-catalyzing, but not simply self-organizing, as they are thermodynamically open systems relying on a continuous input of energy. Self-organization is not an alternative to natural selection, but it constrains what evolution can do and provides mechanisms such as the self-assembly of membranes which evolution then exploits.
The evolution of order in living systems and the generation of order in certain non-living systems was proposed to obey a common fundamental principal called "the Darwinian dynamic"Bernstein H, Byerly HC, Hopf FA, Michod RA, Vemulapalli GK. (1983) The Darwinian Dynamic. Quarterly Review of Biology 58, 185–207. that was formulated by first considering how microscopic order is generated in simple non-biological systems that are far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Consideration was then extended to short, replicating RNA molecules assumed to be similar to the earliest forms of life in the RNA world. It was shown that the underlying order-generating processes of self-organization in the non-biological systems and in replicating RNA are basically similar.
Cosmology