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13:4

(In »Participatory culture, religious rituals and psychedelic practices«)

Kauffman argues that the apparent presence of emergences means that the principle of self-organisation must be added to Darwinian natural selection in order for the sciences to hang together and provide a comprehensive picture of nature’s various processes. Emergences and their self-organisation quite simply add something fundamental to the sciences that natural selection lacks, namely an idea of how the pre-adaptive material, which is later the basis of the success story of the evolutionary process, actually arises. The point is that the emergence per se is not a product of Darwinian natural selection; rather it is something as remarkable as a suddenly arisen and self-organising phenomenon, spontaneously emanating from a disorganised chaos, which later turns out to be a piece in the jigsaw puzzle with a perfect fit when circumstances in the otherwise Darwinian process change.