 In this video, we'll be talking about the process of emergence and the theory of integrative levels. We'll firstly give an overview to this concept of biological organization before discussing further the process of emergence, encapsulation, fractal structures and feedback loops between micro and macro levels of organization within ecosystems. Empirically, a large portion of the complex biological systems we observe in nature exhibit a hierarchical structure and this manifest structure helps in organizing the study of ecologies. It helps to structure the study of ecology into a conceptually manageable framework where the biological world is organized into a nested hierarchy ranging in scale from genes to cells to tissues to organs to organisms to species to populations to communities to ecosystems to biomes and up to the level of the whole biosphere. Every individual plant and animal is a collection of cells every population is a collection of individual organisms of the same species and every ecosystem consists of populations of different species. This interacting set of hierarchically structured scales can be termed a panarchy or integrative levels but it is also termed biological organization that refers to the hierarchy of complex biological structures and systems. These theories posit that each level in the hierarchy represents an increase in organizational complexity with each entity being primarily composed of the previous level's basic units. The basic principle behind this organization is the concept of emergence where the properties and functions found at a hierarchical level are not present at the lower level. An integrative level or level of organization is a set of phenomena emerging on pre-existing phenomena of a lower level. Typical examples include life emerging on non-living substances and consciousness emerging out of the nervous system. As components combine to produce larger functional holes in the hierarchical series new properties emerge that is to say that one cannot explain all the properties of one level from an understanding of the components at the lower level. In a paper in Science Magazine by Alex Kovakov entitled The Concept of Integrative Levels and Biology he summarized the theory as such. The concept of integrative levels of organization is a general description of the evolution of matter through successive and higher orders of complexity and integration. It views the development of matter from the cosmological changes resulting in the formation of the earth to the social changes in a society as continuous because it is never ending and as discontinuous because it passes through a series of different levels of organization, physical, chemical, biological and social. In the continual evolution of matter new levels of complexity are superimposed on the individual units by the organization and integration of those units into a single system. What were holes on one level become parts on a higher one. Each level of organization possesses unique properties of structure and behavior which though depending on the properties of the constituent elements appear only when these elements are combined in the new system. Knowledge of the laws of the lower level is necessary for a full understanding of the higher level yet the unique properties of phenomena at the higher level cannot be predicted a priori from the laws of the lower level. The laws describing the unique properties of each level are qualitatively distinct and their discovery requires methods of research and analysis appropriate to the particular level. The laws express the new organization relationship i.e. the reciprocal relationships of elementary units to each other and to the unit system as a whole. The concept of integrative levels recognizes as equally essential for the purpose of scientific analysis both the isolation of the parts of a whole and their integration into the store of the whole. Emergence addresses the biological organization of life that self-organizes into layers of emergent whole systems that function according to non-reducible properties. This means that higher order patterns of a whole functional system such as an ecosystem cannot be predicted or understood by a simple summation of the parts and these new properties emerge because the components interact not because the basic nature of the components is changed with water because of emergent properties it is better to study it as a whole but if we have something like two cups on a table because of lack of positive synergy we do not get emergence and thus the system is best understood by simply analyzing each of the parts in isolation to get good answers we must first ask the right questions quite different tools are needed for different levels we do not use a microscope to study the entire ocean a whole city or the behavior of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of emergence our process in solving environmental problems can be significantly slowed when the wrong level is focused upon and thus the wrong questions asked the difficulties in perceiving emergent properties at a higher level of organization can be illustrated by conceiving of a red blood cell in a person's bloodstream from its flow around the body the red blood cell is acquainted with the different parts of the body the brain, the eye and so on but it is very difficult for it to comprehend vision, thought, emotions and activities that come from the body as a whole individual people as small parts of ecosystems and social systems have the same difficulty comprehending ecosystems and social systems as entire integrated entities as they are both emergent macro levels within which we exist on the micro level the theory of integrative levels puts forward a number of principles to the structure of this hierarchical organization firstly, that the higher levels depend upon the lower levels this would appear to be quite apparent higher level phenomena emerge from the more basic constituents without those constituents there can be no form of emergence this would imply that higher levels in the hierarchy are inherently more precarious due to this dependency secondly, that the higher up the level the fewer the instances this again would appear to be self-evident in that emergence involves a process of synthesis that is to say putting things together thus every level up is going to involve a conglomeration process that reduces the number of elements on the next level up thirdly, that the sequence of levels is often described as one of increasing complexity this is far less self-evident and is somewhat debatable proposition in that it depends on how you define complexity for which there are a number of different interpretations one interpretation of complexity that would be congruent with this proposition is the idea that complexity is a combination of both integration and differentiation that is to say a system that has both many parts and those parts being interconnected and interdependent this is one interpretation of a complex system that is congruent with this hypothesis because as we synthesize things we are getting systems that have more parts and those parts are now also more interconnected and interdependent giving us greater complexity hierarchy and emergence give rise to the design principle of encapsulation smaller subsystems are nested or encapsulated within larger structures key to this design pattern is the use of abstraction that is the successive removal of detail smaller, local, specific sub-components are nested within larger, more generic processes and structures hierarchical encapsulation through abstraction is central to the structural design of complex systems of all kind it can be seen as a fundamental pattern through which we can get a functioning ordered system given such complexity by distributing components out across different levels the so-called parable of the watchmakers illustrates this there once were two watchmakers named horror and tempus who made very fine watches the phones in their workshops rang frequently, new customers were constantly calling them however horror prospered while tempus became poorer and poorer in the end tempus lost his shop what was the reason behind this? the watches that tempus made were designed such that when he had to put down a partly assembled watch for instance to answer the phone it immediately fell into pieces and had to be reassembled from the basic elements horror had designed his watches so that he could put together sub-assemblies of about 10 components each 10 of these sub-assemblies could be put together to make a large sub-assembly finally 10 of the larger subsystems constituted the whole watch each assembly could be put down without falling apart horror's design is an example of abstraction and an encapsulation design pattern that is central to dealing with complexity this hierarchical nested structure is seen within fractal forms that exhibit self-similarity across various scales of magnitude examples within ecosystems include everything from proteins and DNA to the capillaries in mammals, tree canopies, river networks and mountain ranges this self-similarity or fractality implies a particular kind of structural composition or dynamic behavior it implies that the fundamental features of the system exhibit an invariant hierarchical organization that holds over a wide range of spatial scales and can be derived from simple iterative rules in this process we get the emergence of a new level of organization a structure that has some integrity to its parts or within which some process takes place and this creates its own distinct pattern this then feeds back to shape and constrain the components on the local level we get the emergence of some process for the process to take place there needs to be an enabling structure that structure then defines some order to the system and the local components must differentiate their states in order to perform the various structural and functional roles required to process the resource on the macro level this is most evident from the way the human body as a whole regulates every local component of itself in order to enable global processes such as respiration and digestion this is a micro to macro to micro feedback loop through the many different emergent levels from the cell to tissues to organs and the entire organism and thus to understand and properly manage some ecosystem like a forest we must be knowledgeable about the trees as populations but we must also study the forest as a whole ecosystem within these ecosystems the local dynamics of a set of interacting agents supports an emergent set of global dynamical structures which stabilize themselves by setting the boundary conditions within which the local components operate that is to say these global structures can reach down to their own physical basis of support and fine-tune them in the furtherance of their own global ends such local to global back to local multi-level feedback loops are essential to life and the maintenance of ecosystem tomeostasis although we may understand this well on the micro level of a single organism like the human body it is not so well understood on the micro level of a whole ecosystem and the biosphere but this idea on the micro level of the whole biosphere is captured in the gyro hypothesis life emerged on earth over 3.5 billion years ago since then despite a number of planetary scale catastrophes such as snowball events, asteroid bombardments runaway climate effects and change in the sun's brightness biological systems have in some form or another managed to exist in a continuous fashion and evolve the gyro hypothesis puts forward the idea that this stability rather than being the product of fortune is a demonstration of certain homeostatic properties that the earth possesses this hypothesis suggests there are certain feedback loops that go from the micro level of local ecosystems to the global biosphere and feedback in such a way that the biosphere enables the condition for its preservation, regional and global homeostasis in this video we've been talking about emergence and integrative levels central concepts within systems ecology that give us some structure to our analysis of ecosystems we talked about integrative levels or levels of biological organization as a set of phenomena emerging on pre-existing elements of a more basic form how through this process of emergence we get many integrative levels creating a hierarchical structure that can exhibit self-similarity across many scales called fractal structures with small local phenomena nested within larger more generic structures finally we discuss the complex micro to macro dynamic within the hierarchy of ecologies where macro level emergent processes and structures feedback to both enable and constrain the micro level constituent components