 As the famous scientist Carl Sagan once said, the beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. This short quote goes to the heart of the system's paradigm and tells us why it is the relationship between components that we are really interested in when seeing the world from the system's perspective. A relation is a simple but abstract concept. It is the connection or interaction between two or more components. Through this connection, there is an exchange of some matter, energy, information, or ideas that bind the elements into a state of interdependency, where the total gains and losses of any component are correlated with those of others in the relationship. These relationships between the system's constituent elements can be fundamentally of two different kinds, constructive or destructive. We call constructive relations synergies and destructive relations interference. Starting with synergies. A synergy is an interaction or cooperation of two or more components to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects. A classical example of a synergy is the relationship between the honey bee and the flower it pollinates. Bee and plant interact by exchanging pollen and nectar. Both elements have a need that they cannot fulfill themselves. The bee needs some resource for its subsistence, which it cannot produce itself. And the plant that is incapable of mobility needs some form of transportation for its pollen. It can be said that they both get out of this interaction more than they put in, and thus the sum total is greater than the simple combination of their resources in isolation. Examples of synergistic phenomena are ubiquitous in the natural world, but another example of a synergy could be the increased gains resulting from a business merger which can be attributed to various factors such as combined talent or economics of scale and cost reduction. With synergies, the value added by the system as a whole, beyond that contributed independently by the parts, is created primarily by the relationship among the parts, that is, how they are interconnected. In contrast to synergistic relations, we also have relations of interference that are destructive in nature, meaning they reduce the combined output of the system to less than the sum of its parts. Interference is the prevention of a process or activity from being carried out properly due to some interaction between elements or systems. An example of this would be the interference between two drugs, a situation in which a substance affects the activity of another drug in negative ways when both are administered together, thus reducing the overall positive effect to less than the benefit of the individual effects in isolation. Another simple example of this is destructive interference between sound waves, where sound waves that are out of sync lead to their cancelling each other out. Thus we can see how the degree of synchronization or asynchronization between elements is an important factor in determining the nature of the relations between them. We can also note that synergies often arise as a product of differentiation and specialization. Differentiation is a process that occurs in many systems as they develop. It is defined by the proliferation of subsystems and specialized elements internal to the system in order to make it more capable of responding to a greater diversity of states within its environment. Differentiation occurs most notably during the development of a multicellular organism which originates as a single cell, but through cellular division the organism develops a multitude of differentiated or specialized cells capable of performing many different functions. The same can be observed in the development of technologies and social organization. The point to take away from this is that this process of differentiation also involves the proliferation of relations with which the now specialized components can avail of each other's services. For example, as the global economy has grown with different areas focusing on their specialized domains we have also seen the proliferation of trade relations. And this process of specialization and then exchange is a key source of synergistic relations. In the next section we will be carrying on our discussion of synergies when we talk about emergence.