I really liked this book but I have to take off one star because I was left wanting.

The author uses a number of examples that are interesting, but he does not expand enough (for me) on the theories of complexity and emergence. It's more of a light, but interesting, read than a truly informative book for someone who wants to learn more about complexity theory and emergent properties of systems.

I'm not suggesting it should have been a complexity theory textbook, but a little more description of the theories would have been nice.

"If the ants had been the first species to invent the personal computers, they would have no doubt built pheromone interfaces."

Every now and then I start reading and realize "this book is going to change how I think."

Its a little bit scary and a lot of bit exciting.

While I know--I know--I picked this up because I thought it was about disease, Emergence has proved far more interesting and satisfying than I could hope. Emergence's premise is about networks and 'organized' behavior that develops from a lower-level to a more sophisticated one. In one sense, this is a very real snapshot of the history of thinking/science captured in a book, no less pertinent for its publication date. We have been coming out of the ages of hierarchy and webs from how we explain and understand the universe, from biology to political systems. Now there is a new type of explanation. From looking at how disorganized individuals spring up into a larger, organized whole, he explains slime mold, ants selecting new colony sites, video games, and grassroots political revolutions.

He is one of those rare science writers that sees across disciplines and speaks intelligibly about all of them.

I bought this as was going at reduced price, fascinated by the title, as its the name of the game my son was trying to write around 2001, when this book was published actually, so maybe he read it. And as he has disappeared to Viet Nam I'm keeping it for him for when he eventually returns to N Ireland!

Some of the ideas in this book can lead you so far down the rabbit hole you might not be able to return – at least, not return as the same person you were when you went in. On some level we can grasp the astonishing order-out-of-chaos phenomenon that is an ant hill or a termite mound. We can make the intellectual leap to cities and political movements organizing themselves from the bottom up. But can we see ourselves, our conscious minds, as little more than localized, semi-autonomous systems that just happened to come together temporarily to create the mysterious, and perhaps illusory, “I am”? It is like saying, “I get that electricity and magnetism are just two sides of the same thing; I can accept that matter and energy are likewise; but space and time are just different manifestations of relativistic reality? Whoa, I need to think about that one.”

So, crawl down that rabbit hole, say hello to Alice and the gang, and learn why the Cheshire Cat smiles.

There is a fractal-like self-symmetry as we move up the levels of abstraction from slime molds to beehives to human beings to collections of humans called cities to – well, who knows? Even if we cannot grasp the philosophical implications of self-organizing behavior, we can use them to our benefit, but when we insert ourselves into the process we end up with worse outcomes. A good example is cities: left to themselves they could self-organize into optimal configurations, but we never allow that to happen. Instead, prejudice and self-interest warp development, suboptimizing the end result.

One of the most interesting parts of the book for me was Friedrich Engels’ observations about the city of Manchester. He saw how, without any top-down planning, it had self-sorted itself into multiple districts, for tradesmen, banking, government, and residential (rich and poor). He and Marx viewed this through the prism of end-stage capitalism oppressing the workers, who would soon rise up to overthrow their masters and bring forth the next stage of human development, socialism. Marx and Engels were constrained by their world view, and could only see human development in terms of the (to them) inevitable progression of mankind from slavery through feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and finally, the “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” workers’ paradise of communism. Modern readers are not limited to Marx’s pseudo-scientific historical imperatives, and can see the world as he could not. What if all those stages of human development were just different manifestations of blind self-organization, each stage optimized for its time and technology? How different would history have been if Marx had been able to see them as necessary, transitory, and with absolutely no pre-ordained teleological end state?

Once you accept the notion of self-organization you start to see it everywhere, and wonder how those systems work and what they are evolving into. You also start to think about the external forces acting on them and whether, in attempting to make things better, they are just making a mess of everything.

All of this is packed into the first half of the book, which is good, because the second half is not very good. It was like the author had one great idea to get out, but it wasn’t enough to fill a book, so his agent told him to keep writing. The rest of the book reads like a collection of short articles on early twenty-first century technology trends and predictions, most of which have not aged well.

So, Emergence is worth reading, at least the first half. It presents a powerful idea in a non-technical manner, and helps the reader understand some of the complex systems that run the world.

“The runaway power of geometric progression is not just a mathematically oddity - it is also essential to the very origins of life.”

Um dos melhores livros que já li. Mostra como estamos profundamente conectados e como essas conexões nos afetam sem nos darmos conta. Ajuda a compreender a ilusão da supremacia do indivíduo sobre o coletivo.

It's more like a 3.5.

In suspecting that chatGPT's ability is some kind of "emergence", I asked it to recommend some books on "emergence" for me, and this is one of them.

I like it and I don't. -- the part about ant hills, neural nets, and Manchester (or, self-organization of urban cities) is good; the endless part about media feels like a stretch.

But overall I hope to read something a bit "deeper". Maybe more "academic" -- not applying an idea, albeit an interesting and novel one, to just about any practical stuff the author happened to think of, but just a bit more about the idea itself. The applicability and more importantly, the limitations.

So I like the fact that, the author indeed mentioned that emergence could be bad. Or terrible. Just because something new or unexpected emerges out of local interactions doesn't guarantee this emergence is desirable. Indeed.

It's also interesting to read a book written around 2000 about all kinds of fads then and predictions for future -- because now we have more data to check his predictions. And some are really good (like the Ads will really be personalized). I hope he still like this idea (as in the book), because I surely don't.

This was written over 20 years ago and is great for two reasons.

The first is that the basic premise is solid. The science of ant colonies, human cell formation and cities is really compelling and fun to read about. Jane Jacobs forever.

The second is the state of the internet at the time. A lot of what the author highlights as cutting edge is kind of funny, but he actually forecasts the evolution of the internet in several surprising ways, mostly regarding 'bottom-up' decision making and advertising algorithms.

It's worth a read.

Interesting book, good review of systems studies.

The inside flap of the book cover summarizes the book well: "Emergence is what happens when an interconnected system of relatively simple elements self-organizes to form more intelligent, more adaptive higher-level behavior. It's a bottom-up model; rather than being engineered by a general or a master planner, emergence begins at the ground level." Johnson's book identifies this phenomenon as the principle of emergence. It operates like Adam Smith's invisible hand or, otherwise, like some sort of life field theory -- local plus local, etc. produces an intelligent (works for everyone), global result.

Johnson opens his book with a description of ant colonies that express this principle: "We see emergent behavior in systems like ant colonies when the individual agents in the system pay attention to their immediate neighbors rather than wait for orders from above. They think locally and act locally, but their collective action produces global behavior." The principle applies to human evolution. We are the products of individual cells whose self-interest it was to fuse into the collectivity of the human body. Johnson acknowledges those who might question the bottoms-up argument when it comes to our evolution. Some might argue he says that we are merely following the dictates of our DNA, which is "the ultimate in centralization." "But," he responds, "cells do more than just follow the dictates of DNA. They also learn from their neighbors. And, without that local interaction, the master plan of our genetic code would be utterly useless." Moving forward a few million years, the same principle is at work organizing human affairs. At the apex of this bottoms-up emergence principle is the internet. Everybody does their own thing and somehow organically it all works out, even though there's no world-czar running the show.


Johnson wants to convey a somewhat mystical self-organizing property, like crystal formation, just taking off and taking over. But, slipped in throughout the book and in all of Johnson's examples are words like "create," "designed," "the goal," etc. In the examples he uses there is always a "creator," a something at the top, at whatever scale, that sets the tone for what follows. These are structures where parts are governed by the whole. For ant colonies, it's true, there is no ant czar. But there is a mutation-natural selection principle at work that imposes an overall design to ensure that there's adaptation and, hence, survival. Ditto for DNA's role in human evolution. Johnson casts aside DNA's "tyranny" because our cells obviously came together to form bodies. But what was it exactly that allowed such cooperation? The capacity, or necessity, for cooperation developed via mutation and natural selection because it provided survival benefit and this "principle of cooperation" got embedded in the DNA.

For humans, it might be best to look at these self-organizing occurrences through their different levels or scales of operation, with each being driven by goal-driven processes that benefit each level of organization. Individuals pursue their self-interest, just as Adam Smith highlighted and overall patterns have emerged as a result. This is Johnson's argument, to be sure, but that's not to say that top-down processes are not also working to regulate such "invisible hand" phenomena. Market economies as well as socialist economies have significant top-down, hierarchical "design" principles that guide or mold local emergence. It is the same with the internet. While local groups and people do their thing but, the table is also set by designers and decision-makers who also have their own top-down agendas. Johnson's emphasis is (exclusively?) on the bottoms-up part, as if the top-down governing structures are not, really, applicable. Also, there is ample room for variability - degrees - where locals have more freedom or where overarching structures pretty much dominate what happens below.

The overall patterns that emerge provide, Johnson implies thought the notion of "self-organization," benefits for the whole. In other words, what emerges is good. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The results of locals doing their thing reflect who people are. That's what is happening with the internet. It's no different at the top level where internet executives run their respective systems for their own benefit - making money - by algorithms that manipulate local users. The wholes are an extension of what lies below and that may be good or not so good.

Johnson's "emergence" focus is on self-organizing systems. He does not discuss another form of emergence that I was looking for when I picked up this book. This is the rise of new phenomena that, causally, could not have occurred prior to certain other conditions. In turn, these themselves could not have occurred without prior conditions, etc. Events that are the products of what occurred before could never have been predicted. They could only be seen retrospectively. For example, the formation of life on Earth, perhaps unique in the cosmos because the conditions for life formation were just right (Earth's position relative to the sun and Jupiter), allowed life to emerge. As another example, humans probably could not have emerged without the extinction of the dinosaurs by the meteor strike in the Yucatan Peninsula 70 million years ago. That strike cleaned the slate so to say, allowing for the rise of the mammals. Now that kind of stuff is "emergence."

One of my all-time favourite books. The first, but similar to Matt Ridley's "The Rational Optimist" and Tim Harford's "Adapt", all of which have made clear to me the role of order emerging in a bottom-up, unplanned way. Great humility when I made my living at the time in corporate planning.

Johnson, like Malcolm Gladwell,, Michael Lewis and Tim Harford is an expert at weaving knowledge into a great story, which really helps to make it stick.