Complexity: A Very Short Introduction John H. Holland
Capítulo 6
The whole is much more than the sum of its parts: what our cells can do together cannot be compared to what they would do independently.
The characteristic of ‘wetness’ cannot reasonably be assigned to individual H2O molecules, so we see that the wetness of water is not obtained by summing up the wetness of the constituent molecules—wetness emerges from the interactions between the molecules.
Similarly, common properties of markets, such as ‘bubbles’ and ‘crashes’, are not well-described by summing (say averaging) the acts of individual traders—these larger, emergent effects depend upon the interactions of the traders.
