The emergence as a result of evolution of eukaryotic cells (cells with a nucleus) allowed evolution to follow the path of the formation of multicellular organisms. Here, theologians (who attribute a goal to every movement) and creationists (who believe that everything was created by the Creator), that is, people who are confident that nothing can be built by itself, have big doubts that natural causes (selection in this case) were able to shape our wonderful green world.
Why did multicellular organisms actually appear? They appeared because there are ecological niches that unicellular organisms cannot occupy. Nature seeks to fill all the voids with something. If there is a niche, then evolution is trying to adapt some organisms to fill the niche. If this succeeds, then a new species appears in the niche, otherwise the insufficiently adapted species disappears.
SYNERGISTIC CONCEPT.
Today, new ideas have appeared about what was noticed back in the time of Aristotle. Some authors use the term “self-organization” for them, others “synergetics”. The Belgian scientist Ilya Prigozhin came to the concept of self-organization through the development of thermodynamics of open systems, and the term "synergetics" was introduced by the German physicist Hermann Haken. (Born 1927) The word "synergetics" of ancient Greek origin means "cooperation, joint action."
Both synergetics and the theory of self-organization investigate the processes of self-organization and self-disorganization in open systems of physical, chemical, biological, ecological, social and other nature.
Today science considers all known systems from the smallest (elementary particles) to the largest (the Universe) - open, exchanging energy, (or) matter and (or) information with the environment and are, as a rule, in a state far from thermodynamic balance. And the development of such systems, as it became known, proceeds through the formation of increasing orderliness. On this basis, the idea of self-organization of material systems arose.
If the term “progress” is understood as the processes of self-organization of living matter, then we can say that philosopher Lamarck, substantiating his concept of evolution, “felt” their presence. However, an alternative approach to explaining evolutionary changes in the form of Darwin's “natural selection” does not contradict the principles of self-organization, leads to the observed progress of living systems and, moreover, is constructive.
For self-assembly and self-organization, certain conditions are required. Water becomes ice when the temperature drops to zero degrees.
The emergence of ordered complex systems is due to the emergence of collective types of behavior under the influence of fluctuations, their competition and the selection of the type of behavior that turns out to be able to survive in conditions of competition.
As Haken himself notes, this leads us in a certain sense, to a kind of generalized Darwinism, the action of which extends not only to the organic, but also to the inorganic world. Self-organization, according to G. Haken, is "the spontaneous formation of highly ordered structures from embryos or even from chaos."
Self-organizing systems acquire their inherent structures or functions without any outside interference. Self-organizing systems are able to maintain internal stability when exposed to the external environment, they find ways of self-preservation in order not to collapse and even improve their structure.
An example of self-organization is ontogenesis, when from one cell, as a result of self-organization processes, a whole organism grows with its inherent properties that are not laid down in the form of instructions in the genes. The amount of information in the genome is much less than it is in a multicellular organism.
The same considerations work in social societies when they self-organize, when separate structures emerge from an unorganized mass of individuals. At the same time, mental changes occur in each individual.
Previous investigators of these processes believed that structures already existed in the collective memory, without indicating, however, where this memory is located. This is certainly not the case. New relationships in societies arise "here and now", but taking into account the conditions of the external environment, the mentality of others.
In the early 70s of the last century I. Prigogine managed to develop a new concept of self-organization of chemical and physical systems. Here is how I. Prigogine outlines the path of evolution of the system from the initial state through chaos to the state of new organization.
In a closed isolated system, energy or matter is introduced from the outside in a metered dose so that the initial state in it does not go beyond the specified boundaries (for example, a Russian stove, a fire, etc.). In an open nonlinear system, there are no such restrictions. Here the substance and energy of the medium can enter it arbitrarily, therefore such a system can go out of equilibrium and become non-equilibrium. With the further inflow of matter and energy, it accelerates further and further from the equilibrium position, becoming more and more non-equilibrium and unregulated.
The organization of the state of such a system is increasingly shaken until, finally, it collapses at all and the process becomes chaotic. Thus, at the first stage of its evolution, a nonequilibrium process passes from a state of order to chaos.
The state of maximum chaos in a nonequilibrium process is called a bifurcation point (from Latin bifurkus - bifurcated).
Due to the chaotic nature, the further development of the nonequilibrium process has not one path of movement, but many possible paths from the branching zone, that is, from the bifurcation point. The bifurcation state can be likened to the position of a ball on a convex surface, such as a spherical one, which is unstable. Any influence can bring the ball out of an unstable state, and it will begin to roll from top to bottom. It is impossible to guess exactly what trajectory it will roll from the bifurcation point. This is a random process.
But as soon as the trajectory of movement from top to bottom is determined, the direction of movement will begin to obey necessity. Now the necessity predetermines with what final the non-linear process will end.
The segment of the evolutionary path from the bifurcation point to the required final is called an attractor (from Latin attrahere - I attract).
This means that the final point of the development of a nonlinear process, or the final, seems to attract to itself, that is, they predetermine the trajectory of the nonlinear process (the movement of the ball) from the point of bifurcation. The attractor is likened to a kind of funnel, or a cone, which, with its bell, faces the branching zone, and with its narrow neck, towards the final result. This means that a ball on a convex surface can enter the funnel mouth not from a single point, but from a number of adjacent positions of the branching zone. As one moves along the attractor, the set of possible variants of motion is reduced and, ultimately, the process necessarily ends with a single result.
If we move from a ball to a social system and introduce additional energy from the outside into an unstable social system, then a new organization will begin to emerge. When the value of the input energy reaches a certain critical value, the system suddenly (abruptly) passes from a chaotic state to a stable (organized) state.
The deployment of a nonlinear process from the bifurcation point to the choice of an attractor is the beginning of the second part of the evolutionary nonlinear process, in which randomness and nonrandomness (predetermination) are compensated and complement each other.
In the light of the new concept, the question of the relationship between the accidental and the lawful in development is resolved differently than before. Evolutionary stages are very rigidly determined, the behavior of the system is predictable and even controllable here, if the necessary management means are available. At the critical points (bifurcation points) reached by the system at the final stages of the evolutionary process, randomness prevails. At such points, it is impossible to predict the new stable state into which the system will pass during the jump. And the next evolutionary stage starts precisely from the random transition of the system to a new level.
The bifurcation point figuratively appears as an intersection with several branches of the path, and on it, as in a fairy tale, the choice of the path also means the choice of fate.
So it was with Russia in 1917 and 1990. The difference lies in the different mentality of people on these dates, in a different social environment.
UNDERSTANDING OF SELF - ORGANIZATION PROCESSES.
The brain of Homo sapiens is poorly adapted to understand the processes of self-organization. Our subconscious, filled with cultural MEMs that have absorbed the experience of many previous generations, accustomed to planning their actions, focusing on the expected result, is not ready to accept the concept of self-organization. Therefore, it seems to us that if you do not foresee something, do not control, then nothing good will come of it - only devastation and chaos.
It seems to us that if we plan our actions to achieve our goal, then the almighty creating our world acted in the same way, i.e. first conceived, and then carried out the conceived.
He was called God and he is so great and powerful that 6 days was enough for him to realize all these plans.
To be convinced of the groundlessness of theological concepts, one can recall that the mind, to which we so love to attribute everything ordered, exists only for a moment in comparison with evolutionary periods of time in billions of years. Living nature developed without the mediation of reason, but at the same time it became more complex and streamlined until it created a person who can already create and organize himself, but in his own way.
If we assume that there is a creator God, then the question immediately arises: "And who created him?" The hypothesis of God explains nothing, but compels us to abandon the search for explanations.
When the Soviet biologist Timofeev-Ressovsky was asked about God, he replied: “I don’t remember that because I was little then.” Stories from old religious books do not hold up, but they don't need to. Religion is based on faith and science is based on facts.
In everyday activities, a person is faced with the manifestation of entropy, i.e. with the emergence over time from the created order of chaos. The constructed building is perceived as order, but this is our order, and for nature it is something alien, and it seeks to destroy it, turn it into its own order, which we call chaos.
The erected objects, left without maintenance, are destroyed and become unusable. So, each individual object can be attributed to the desire for chaos. This further enhances the motivation of a person to attribute all actions to build our world to Almighty God, in order to quickly end this issue and go to dinner.
A construction worker knows for sure that if you are at a construction site, among bricks, cement and other building materials, then you will never be able to see how, under the influence of some forces, the materials will themselves fold into a finished building. If a hurricane sweeps over an aviation dump, it is impossible for an assembled Boeing to emerge from the wreckage of the aircraft. This will not happen, since the assembled Boeing is our order. Nature has a different understanding of order. Do not forget that certain conditions are needed for self-organization.
EXAMPLES OF SELF - ORGANIZATION.
Water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen molecules. When heated, it first turns into steam when the molecules lose their bond with each other. Upon further heating, the molecules will decay into hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and if heated even more, then the atoms will decay. We see that when the temperature changes, certain group rearrangements occur by themselves.
Let us lower the temperature below zero and the water, which is always in the air, condenses in the form of snowflakes with a complex, intricate structure. Who invented it? This structure of snowflakes? None. It's just that this structure turned out to be energetically favorable for water molecules. In such a structure, molecules have minimal energy. Therefore, when heating it is necessary, first to spend some energy to compensate for the resulting energy deficit (heat of fusion), and then this mass becomes ordinary water. There is no miracle.
After the Big Bang, from elementary particles, atoms, molecules, galaxies, and life arose. All this arose by itself as a result of self-assembly. There is no miracle here - in each case there are forces leading to the process of ordering.
Crystal growth is a self-ordering process when a crystal is drawn (built) from a supersaturated solution.
In general, under certain conditions, microparticles themselves begin to build up in the form of ordered structures when they are exposed to some kind of external influence. However, this effect is directed not at a specific particle, as occurs during manual assembly "from top to bottom", but at all at once. In self-assembly, the processes go from the bottom up.
These processes play an important and growing role in modern technologies using nanoparticles (i.e. particles of a billionth of a meter).
In the process of self-assembly, there is no control element (in other words, there is no plan or drawing familiar to us), that is, there is no system in any form that describes the sequence of installation acts or the order of arrangement of elements in the structure of self-assembly products.
Plan and blueprint are always a product of the mind, and ordering is quite possible without the presence of mind.
The specificity of the phenomenon of self-assembly lies in the fact that the process is undoubtedly deterministic, although the mechanism of determination is not always fully understood. The present century can be called the age of nanotechnology. We began to master what has been successfully working in nature for a long time. Nanotechnology makes it possible to create materials with unusual properties.
However, if we looked at the self-assembly process not from above, but from the point of view of the particle itself (imagine that we have decreased by a billion times), then the processes would look natural - under the influence of a certain force, the particles would take their natural positions. Water molecules in a reservoir under the influence of gravity form a flat horizontal surface and this does not seem a miracle to anyone. If the water were viscous enough, this would not have happened. Due to its high viscosity, the asphalt has to be smoothed with a roller.
I cited this example to show that there is nothing fantastic, and no reason is needed for the processes of self-assembly and self-organization to proceed.
In the process of self-assembly, such complex objects as viruses are formed, which stand between living and inanimate objects. Ontogenesis (development of a living organism) also uses a genetic code, which indirectly contributes to the direction at each moment of the processes of self-assembly of molecules inside the cell. The interaction of cells affects the processes of transcription, which contributes to the differentiation of cells, the formation of specialized cells from one original cell.
The cell resembles an automated plant. She receives instructions in her genes about the possible shape of bricks (proteins) for construction, and builds, but the process is engulfed in feedbacks that channel the construction process. No matter how complex the program written in the genome may be, it will not be able to take into account all the circumstances arising in ontogeny, and that is why negative (stabilizing) feedbacks are needed.
When they do not exist, but there is one vertical, then this is a disaster - this is cancer. Cancer cells that arise in the process of mutations differ in that they do not perceive information from other cells in the body (they have become sovereign in the body as a result of one mutation). Therefore, cancer cells, do not coordinate their actions with other cells of the body, grow into all surrounding tissues, bringing the entire body into a state incompatible with life.
The evolutionary process in biology can be viewed as a combination of self-organization processes with the action of natural selection and the accompanying mechanisms of evolutionary development generated by the action of selection.
SOCIAL SYSTEMS.
Social systems also evolve as a result of self-organization. The emerging human mind is trying to take control of this process. But its capabilities are only enough to influence the direction of processes at bifurcation points.
If you pushed the ball (helped it slide) off the surface of the mountain, then the trajectory of the ball is determined by the relief of the mountain. The social environment, the mentality of the population are analogous to the mountain relief, determining the trajectory of social development.
If you plan to control the rolling ball down the mountain, this will not be possible. In a social system that has overcome the bifurcation point, control of the trajectory will require the establishment of a totalitarian regime that will not be able to lead society into the valley of peace and prosperity.
There are no control forces that provide the ball with the desired trajectory, it will roll while rolling against the unevenness of the terrain, changing its trajectory with each impact. But the properties of the ball also affect the trajectory.
All dictators, ruling societies, are faced with insurmountable obstacles that show the limited possibilities of managing society in the dictatorship regime.
On the scale of the microworld, during the construction of a very complex multicellular organism, nowhere is there a person responsible for the construction of the whole organism. Distributed cooperative construction is underway. A certain section is being built in each place. Each cell contains a complete genome, but not all genes are read, only genes that are perceived by the protein reading complex of the cell are read. Signaling molecules send information about the environment to promoters that activate the reading process of a particular gene.
Thus, the external environment actively influences the construction of a multicellular organism. Democracy is not a ballot box for voting and other attributes of a democratic society; it is the ability of the environment (each of us) to influence, to one degree or another, the overall process of building a social organism. Democracy is not a dictatorship of the majority or elites; it is taking into account the interests of all minorities too. Ontogenesis processes are a kind of analogue of successful democracy.
Let there be many unsuccessful examples of the implementation of democratic principles, but without elements of self-government we will inevitably fall into a dead end. The question is in the search for the structure of democratic institutions for a society with a certain mentality, and not in whether it should be or is it useless.