The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex

by Harold J. Morowitz

When the whole is greater than the sum of the parts--indeed, so great that the sum far transcends the parts and represents something utterly new and different--we call that phenomenon emergence. When the chemicals diffusing in the primordial waters came together to form the first living cell, that was emergence. When the activities of the neurons in the brain result in mind, that too is emergence.
In The Emergence of Everything , one of the leading scientists involved in the study of complexity, Harold J. Morowitz, takes us on a sweeping tour of the universe, a tour with 28 stops, each one highlighting a particularly important moment of emergence. For instance, Morowitz illuminates the emergence of the stars, the birth of the elements and of the periodic table, and the appearance of solar systems and planets. We look at the emergence of living cells, animals, vertebrates, reptiles, and mammals, leading to the great apes and the appearance of humanity. He also examines tool making, the evolution of language, the invention of agriculture and technology, and the birth of cities. And as he offers these insights into the evolutionary unfolding of our universe, our solar system, and life itself, Morowitz also seeks out the nature of God in the emergent universe, the God posited by Spinoza, Bruno, and Einstein, a God Morowitz argues we can know through a study of the laws of
nature.
Written by one of our wisest scientists, The Emergence of Everything offers a fascinating new way to look at the universe and the natural world, and it makes an important contribution to the dialogue between science and religion.

Genres: Science, Philosophy, History, Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Harold Joseph Morowitz was an American biophysicist who studied the application of thermodynamics to living systems. Author of numerous books and articles, his work includes technical monographs as well as essays. The origin of life was his primary research interest for more than fifty years. He was the Robinson Professor of Biology and Natural Philosophy at George Mason University after a long career at Yale.

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this odd little book, Harold Morowitz, a molecular biologist writing near the end of a long and distinguished career, sets out to explain Life, the Universe and Everything. I have rarely seen it done in quite as literal a way. Morowitz starts with the Big Bang, and systematically outlines how things progressed from clouds of hydrogen and helium with barely detectable density fluctuations to stars, planets, complex molecules, microorganisms, multicellular life, vertebrates, fish, reptiles, mammals, apes and finally us. He says that it isn't random: there are deep reasons why roughly this series of "emergences" (new levels of complexity built on previously existing structures) is inevitable.

Is he just a crank? On the minus side, he writes very badly (I wondered if he wasn't a native speaker of English, but apparently he is), and his arguments are often hard to follow. He repeats himself in an irritating way. When he's talking about subjects that are a long way from his area of expertise, he can seem naive: there is no mention of galaxy formation at the beginning, and his remarks on the structure of human language near the end amply demonstrate that he knows nothing about linguistics. But on his home territory of biology and evolution, he says some interesting things. I hadn't understood how important adenosine is to life, or why it was so difficult to move from unicellular to multicellular organisms, or the critical importance of nerve cells. I was particularly impressed by his discussion of how reptiles gradually evolved into human beings. I can well believe it's not an accident that mammals had to evolve first: the fact that they nurse their young means that there is extended contact between mother and child over a long period. This opens the possibility for learned characteristics to be passed on by imitation, creating a completely different and much faster type of evolution. And it's striking that birds, which independently evolved from a different branch of the reptile family, ended up acquiring many of the same adaptations; perhaps the progression towards warm-blooded creatures possessing a strong parent-child bond is an increase in complexity that has to happen.

At the end, it all gets decidedly mystical. He ties his ideas together with a non-standard theology based on the philosophies of Spinoza and Teilhard de Chardin; the laws of nature are identified with God the Father, and Emergence with the Holy Spirit. We are the latest part of the process by which the Spirit is incarnating itself in the universe. God, it turns out, can perform miracles, and does it through our agency. Morowitz gives the example of an engineer who sees that a river is about to overflow, and foresightedly persuades people to pile sandbags in order to avert a disaster. When the scheme succeeds, it's wildly improbable according to a naive interpretation of the principles of physics, but in Morowitz's vision, God is working through us to make it happen; as our technology matures, we will see more and more striking examples of this kind of thing.

I can't say that I'm sold, but it's an interesting perspective. I was curiously reminded of James Blish's SF epic Cities in Flight: there, too, God causes human beings to develop technology in order to realize His plan. Of the two, Blish is undeniably the more entertaining, but Morowitz has taken more trouble to make the science plausible. Recommended if you like unusual takes on spirituality.

[J TC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harold J Morowitz – The Emergence of Everything
In this review I begin by a sentence found in the book “a physicist is a set of atoms that try to understand how atom works”.
In his book, The Emergence of everything publish in 2002, the author takes us into a journey since the beginning of known universe to what we can anticipate as future.
The author starts his book with relevant questions. How do we know?, and how do we know that what we know is real?
These are tricky questions with no simple response. The answer to how do we know? is related to the evolution of man spirit. Probably It all starts with the homo sapiens.
The first records about knowledge date back the Greek philosophers (Leucipo, Tales and Demócrito from the school of Mileto and Abdera) who questioned about their surroundings, and why things happened in a particular way. Heraclito (500 BC) brings the concept of reality being not always the same “water doesn’t pass twice in the same river”. Plato (427-347 BC) have a similar interpretation of the world, since, and according to him, knowledge is dependent of the senses, and those are dependent of the observer. According to Plato we never know we only feel, and the reality of the physical world has no complete correspondence in our mind. Aristoteles (384-322 BC) had a slightly different intuition, and according to him knowledge is not entirely an activity of the mind. Experience is needed to know the world around us.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), a philosopher in a very religious era, had regained the idea of a material world from the ancient’s atomists philosophers. According to Hobbes, all in this world should have a physical base, and even thoughts should flow in our mind on physical bases. With Hobbes the materialistic vision of the world had been recovered.
With René Descartes (1596-1650) science should abandon any subjective misleading of the senses and chose the way of the principles and doubt every notion of a world through the senses (cartesian doubt). Bento de Espinosa (1632-1677) had upgraded Descartes ideas and according to him for the same object we have two ways of acquisition of knowledge. Through the physical characteristics and through the mind. With Spinosa knowledge is dual and comes always in our senses. With him there is a sentient notion of the world. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), comes up in opposition to those like David Hume (1711-1776) and Spinosa had suggest a sentient notion on the acquisition of knowledge, and had suggested that reason is indispensable in the achievement and understanding of the world.
This path showed over the years oscillating positions between those who thought that all knowledge is sense dependent, and those with a more materialistic approach point reason and scientific experience as the only valid method of purchase knowledge. This debate is still going on, and a net example is featured by quantum physics. In the quantum world there are a lot of creepy experiences that are difficult to explain. Perhaps one of the weirdest experiences is the “John Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiment”. In this experience particles can behave has a particle or as a wave. Surprisingly, the intervention of an observer can alter the dual manifestation, and this intervention can occur with a backward, i.e., when the interference is made after the effect. Wired isn’t it?
In the quantum world an observer always interferes with the determinations and is a part of the experiment. This lead the physicist David Bohm to propose that when we interfere with a quantic field, we are interfering with some sort of a “conscientious field”, an universal field with no particular location for an information, that could be elicit every time we interfere, i.e., some sort of an implicate order.
Other investigators and physicists had yet a more solipsistic interpretation as they propose that the quantic reality only have some meaning for the observer.
Beyond the discussion of these philosophic concepts, the other question that the author advances are epistemological, i.e., how we can learn about our world(?), how can we understand what were the emergences that had brought us here since the beginning of days (?). Surely the scientific method is an important tool for the achievement of knowledge. But is it enough? Questions big as those above are to complex to be answered in the experimental model. On account of this inability, Morowitz quotes Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) “science is a discipline that replaces the hard questions we are unable to answer by simpler questions to which we are competent to seek solution”. Knowledge is a cumulative, is made step by step.
The scientific method had evolved in a reductionist fashion by consensus from a series of abstractions such as those from material objects, to molecules, to atoms, to electrons and to probability distributions functions. The reductionist approach in science applies the premise that an explanation at a particular level can give clues of theoretical constructs at another level down. This reductionistic approach to our world had a significant success in biology (organisms, organs, tissues, cells, organelles, macromolecules), in chemistry, in classical and quantum physics and in molecular biology. This reductionistic approach try to seek for exact numerical agreement between measurements to support the theory. But with the scientific method a theory is never definitively validated. Only it’s rejection when observed is confirmed and definitive.
For questions with a scope outside the usual paradigm as: How did life originate?; How does evolution produce new species?; How do the actions of individuals produce societies, economies and markets?, the usual reductionist approach cannot reach an answer. For these kinds of questions interacting by nonlinear rules we need nonlinear differential equations or in computer era, pruning algorithms that allow us to approach to big data and agents interacting with each other in a nonlinear way. This approach is the opposite of the reductionism since the rules observed at a particular level try to be applied to rules and structures of higher hierarchal levels.
For this sort of questions and eventually for the major events in the evolution of the universe, Morowitz proposes three sorts of answers. An approach of a world made according the word of the sacred books; the atheistic view of the world; or the enlightened hypothesis of the Jesuit and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his book “The Phenomenon of Man” (1940), who have proposed an evolutionary perspective to the evolution of the cosmos to the human spirit and beyond. A proposal of something deeper in the evolutionary unfolding of our universe, something that gave the laws of nature a direction in time, i.e., a plan!
I can´t help to find curious the complementarity of this concept and the proposals in the quantic field brought by David Bohm in its “implicate order”.
Regarding the path that the universe, Morowitz identifies several turning points in his journey that somehow are a change in paradigm, and whose overtaking allow evolution to nowadays. Organisms had come from cells, and those from macromolecules, that came come from chemistry, that came from physics, that come from particles. These turning points are identified as emergences that the author identifies as events in a chain in a sequence that can articulate with each other being the whole different and bigger than the sum of the parts. Nevertheless, these events cannot be reasoned without running a computer program, and for these we don´t have yet a firm sense of validating or rejecting theories.
This concept of emergences, like John Holland had proposed in “Emergence: From, Chaos to Order”, the change of paradigm, with the occurrence emergences, rules are altered, and the new ones come with the new paradigm. The emergency generates a fitness for winning, and the new rules (paradigm) elicit a new strategy that may emerge as a genuine novelty.
In this journey, Morowitz can identified at least 28 emergence points that in the judgment of the author where crucial to the path that the universe had taken.
The first emergence is about the primordium, and where the author puts the question, why is there something rather nothing? In is response he took us to the beginning of the universe enunciating the Doppler studies undertook by Edwin Hubble in 1920s. According to this theory, our universe had begin with a huge explosion around 13,5 billions of years ago (this age has only estimated in 2009, after the edition of the book), and for the first 10-43 seconds it was hot, dense and homogeneous universe. Forces where united in one single force, but at that precise time gravity was the first one to become separated. At 10-35 seconds the strong force from the remaining two (weak and electromagnetic). At that time, the universe had a tremendous expansion (by a factor of x 10100), and this was the inflationary period of the universe, and was in that period that the universal law of thermodynamics and particle physics had developed and become universal. After that period the temperature drooped, density drooped. Quarks condensed in hadrons (and with the strong force protons and neutrons had appeared), and leptons originate electrons and neutrinos. After the first three minutes the nuclei were stable and the first atoms (hydrogen, helium and lithium) had appeared.
Is difficult to answer to the question why is there something rather nothing? To start we have something because, and that we know with relative certitude, because of the beginning above. But does this universe persist and is expanding (inflationary universe)? Well, that’s other questions for which we still don’t have an answer (something is supposed to counterbalance gravity).
According to many physicists, and the author quote Steven Weinberg, the first 3 minutes had a sequence of “happy” happenings / accidents, that are the only reason for us to be here. If they don’t happen this universe doesn’t exist the way we know him.
In the second emergence Morowitz call our attention for the fact of with the precocious split of the gravity from the other forces, had allowed its action in a very young universe (10-43 seconds) to become a non-homogeneous universe. That non-homogeneity (density fluctuations) along whit the laws of thermodynamics were the embryogenesis of our universe.
For the third emergence, the author points the formation of stars. The occurrence of stars was only possible because the young universe has density fluctuations. And through a sculptor activity gravity moved atoms of hydrogen and helium that get closer with maintenance of energy, temperature rise once again, and a nucleosynthesis of new elements begin. The physical conditions in the stars explain the abundance of elements and their relative distribution. Some of the frequent as carbon, the basis of life, others a rarity like molybdenum necessary for fixation of cobalt on vit B12, and other like uranium, thorium and potassium-40 whose reactive decay is necessary for tectonics cycle.
Without stars we would not be here. That’s way they are an emergence.
For the fourth emergence the author points the periodic table. On describing the periodic table, the author stresses the richness of it reporting us to the quantic mechanics and the Pauli principle. According to this principle states that no two electrons in an atom can have the same four quantum numbers. And this is the principle that allows the emergent behaviour of elements in their chemical reactions. This principal is why we have the periodic table of elements, the rules of covalent bonding, ionic bonding, metallic bonding, and a sort of properties of solids, liquids and gases. That is to say why we have life in cosmos.
The fifth emergence send us to the accretion of planet earth. And in this process the formation of planet earth is very similar to what happened in the other rocky planets of our solar system. The major important difference was probably the crash between our planet earth and the planet (asteroid?) theia. This crunch in the very beginning of our planet history had allowed a major cold down of the surface while the interior was still hot. This gives us two major characteristics that are indispensable for life (as we know it), i.e., the rapid cool down of the surface with protection against UV rays, and our magnetic shield. Without this emergence life as we know it was not possible.
For the six the planetary distance of the sun and earth dimensions are proposed. A smaller planet would have a low escape velocity and voltaic gases as hydrogen would escape to space. With a greater planet would heat up and life would be impossible. Much of the some can be sad about our distance to the sun.
In seventh Morowitz points the emergence of the geospheres. These are the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, and the biosphere. All these geospheres have mechanisms of control, retro control with feedback positive and negative. This is basically the GAIA concept.
Earth dimensions, earth rotation axis (a result of theia crunch), volcanic activity, and the tectonic plaques movement are the “organic” earth conditions that sustained and supported life on earth.
For the eight the emergence of metabolism is point out. The basic idea suggested by the author is that as consequence of the Pauli principle, the elements in the periodic table have the characteristics favourable to an organic chemistry (see comments to Nick Lane books). The occurrence of this emergence with others described in planet accretion and geospheres formation, had been the basis of life on earth.
For next the author proposes the emergence of cells, prokaryote cells, eukaryotic cells, and the emergency of multicellularity that had marked the trail for the biodiversity in the planet.
With the emergence of multicellularity unicellular organisms became pluricellular and many of these differentiate and had become more fit do a particular task. Among these differentiations it is worthwhile to empathise the formation of gametes that through the fusion of two haploid gametes (sexual reproduction) and the increment of multicellularity with the appearance of a great cellular diversity.
And from the diversity and specialization the author points the neuron as the twelfth emergence.
Small animals don’t require a nervous system since it was easy to control all their parts. As they grow, a nervous system was essential to get control of the body. The neuron was for that reason a landmark in the animal evolution and their emergence could be responsible for the Cambrian explosion.
The origin of the neuron is speculative, and this cell could have their origin in the epithelial cells of hydras that can conduct action potentials. The same his observed in some sponges.
The neuron had made its appearance 700 million years ago, and its emergence allow grow and control of bigger multicellularity organisms, diversity of behaviours and the path to the appearance of the mind.
The prokaryote cell had already some sentience behaviour since those that have flagella could move from less favourable soundings to a more pleasant milieu. This is the basis of conscience what is named by António Damasio as the proto consciousness. With the evolution of the control of the nervous systems behaviour had become more sophisticated, with the appearance of the brain the memory and others cognitive faculties.
For the next emergences the author highlights the evolution from multicellularity to colony formation and animalness evolution, with cephalization in the front with this preferential localization for the sensory system, and the tale localization for the emission of remains and wastes.
The fowling emergences are the formation of chordates whit their radial symmetry, the appearance of the first vertebrates, the crossover of geospheres and the evolution from fish to amphibians, the formation of reptiles, mammals, arboreal mammals, primates, great apes, hominization and competitive exclusion of hominids. In all these emergences and evolution is underlying the concept of niche.
The concept of niche was first described by Charles Elton in 1926 as a competition principle according to which two species competing can’t occupy the same niche, and as a niche we include the geographic localization, predators and resources. This is a Darwin principle (Gauss principle) that can nowadays be recognised in several human conflicts (Indian castes; Japanese medieval society; Uganda conflict in 1960; slavery; Ireland conflict between Catholics and Protestants; Sri Lanka conflict; Israel and Arabs; American natives and colons; Apartheid in South Africa, etc. According the author there no possible pace between groups that compete for the same resource or a geographic space. Only interbreeding can foster a lasting peace.
After describing these emergences related to biological evolution, the author mentioned other related with human achievement as the toolmaking, the agriculture, the technology and urbanization, the philosophy, and religions, science and civilization. Aside these performances the author dedicate two chapters to the language formation (relations between linguistic evolution and brain development – Sapir-Whorf theories) and human the spirit as indispensable conditions that allows human beings to reach the evolution stated above.
For the last emergence he tells us our tasks ahead. In his glance of the future Morowitz suggest two possible evolutions. One vision is based on technology, robotics and the World Wide Web, in a world of knowledge and the utilization of the artificial intelligence as a human emergence. The other is based in the view of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 70 years ago with the emergence of the noosphere and the unification between the human spirit and the cosmos (see David Bohm “implicate order”). Anyway, emergences are difficult to predict before they happen.

[Brett Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me, this book defies ranking, roaming somewhere between a 1-star rating and 5. I was introduced to the author, George Mason University’s Harold Morowitz (1927-2016), after reading a riveting article on prebiotic chemistry and the origins of life by he and two others in a 2009 issue of American Scientist waiting for me for years on the shelf. [1] The topic here is emergence. One of my favorite examples is wetness. Less than a million or so molecules of water between your fingers feel dry and dusty. Exceed that number, and it feels wet and slippery. Wetness is an emergent property once a satisfactory threshold is crossed. There are countless such properties: an emergent property of the Big Bang was matter, stars are emergent from the property of gravity that comes with all that matter, consciousness emerges from a particular ordering of that inanimate jell between our ears. Morowitz treats 28 different emergences: including the periodic table; metabolism; cells; prokaryotes; reptiles; hominids; language; agriculture; philosophy; spirit.

Morowitz is good at presenting the obvious-but-isn’t kernel of evolutionary adaptations. What does the billion-year evolution of the neuron mean? It means slow, short-range cell-to-cell chemical communication got an upgrade. Plugging the first cell into a wire at one end and the second cell into the wire’s other end and we get fast long-range communication. Suddenly creatures can grow in size, able to sense stimulus many cells away and respond accordingly: eat, flee, or have sex. Morowitz concisely explains Spinoza’s God, the curious and delightful Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man), and does a bang-up job on that profound question of Athens and Jerusalem: “On a spring day in the year 350 B.C., there was a stir in the academy at Athens. The increasingly independent experimentalist Aristotle was debating with the seminar mentor Plato, who adopted a much more theoretical view. Forty-nine years earlier, Socrates had downed his hemlock and thus ended his ‘misleading’ the young of Athens. Two hundred miles away in the palace of Philip of Macedon, six-year-old Alexander was beginning his education. Some 400 miles distant in another academy in Jerusalem, a group of scholars were debating the meaning of a biblical passage… both were developing comprehensive world-views of God, man, and the universe, which would resonant far into the future. As Alexander matured and conquered half the world, including Jerusalem, the Greek and Hebrew views were finally to come into a dialogue that has lasted for well over two millennia and has a current importance that can be impressively seen in writings like the 1998 papal encyclical, Faith and Reason.”

And yet, for long sections, the book reads like a list: This happened, then that happened, then another thing took place. After that, this happened, then that happened, and another thing occurred. Morowitz sailed when he entered his field of biology but quickly wore me out looking up so much technical jargon I couldn’t bear the hundredth pause and just read through them, “whatever that is….” And then, there’s God. At the book’s conclusion, it sounds like Morowitz is trying to have both the impersonal laws-of-the-universe-god, which he explicitly aligns with, and the mysterious personal God of tradition. “Transcendence is an emergent property of God’s immanence and rules for emergence,” writes Morowitz. Oh. Really? We can pray to stop a bacterial infection or take antibiotics, says Morowitz. “In both cases, there is a miracle.” No, one is a “miracle” that defies explanation, if it worked, which repeated tests show it doesn’t, and the other is “miraculous,” understood by the cause and effect of science.

A book at times brilliant, at others, perturbing.

[1] JAMES TREFIL, HAROLD J. MOROWITZ, ERIC SMITH, The Origin of Life: A case is made for the descent of electrons, American Scientist, May-June, 2009

[Nicholas Frota]

dude has THE GALL to comment how much he doesn't know non-western cultures AND that western culture is the most scientific, overall. On same paragraph.

he piles up EP on top of EP to find himself on top of it, dismissing all branches that diverge from it.

Entire rant here: https://twitter.com/nonlinear/status/...

[Thomas Ray]

Q175.32 E85 M67 2004 Memorial library

[Luke · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is sort of a let down, with fractal-ish front page and a history of complex-ity I would hope it would have a lot of mathematical concepts and ideas about how life works, how life develops from seed to plant to patterns... maybe some complex fractals? Nope, browsing through and reading a good bit of this, the only equations are on p176, and seem more philosophical.

What's more, the whole book is mostly a lot of unfounded science language about the past. Some interesting scientific facts that are sometimes relevant, but in fact even he notes that much is speculation, though he is an avowed Darwinist (p143). He repeatedly mentions the 10,000yrs or so of supposed human cultural evolution that brought us current religious beliefs, and seems to infer that man created God rather than that God created mankind.
The hypocrisy on this point should be evident, as he mentions the 12 billion years of evolution from nothing or from a big-bang... he mentions this 12 billion year estimate although that very idea is only the (changing) product of current scientific thought less than 100 years old!

Ultimately this has some interesting philosophizing about religion and science, but he seems to think of Man as the emerging God which is an unfortunate trend lately...

[Lukasz]

recommendation: [EP48 Jessica Flack on Complex System Dynamics - The Jim Rutt Show](https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/jessi...)
recommendation: [Transcript of Episode 9 - Joe Norman - The Jim Rutt Show](https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/the-j...)

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Morowitz doesn't make the developing science of Emergence as exciting as I might have hoped, and for that reason this might not be the best introduction to these ideas. It's a great overview of the history of the universe from the very beginning all the way up to the birth of consciousness and beyond. Along the way there's a lot of quick review of basic principles of physics, chemistry, earth science, biology, and animal behaviorism. Morowitz sees an almost mystical, albeit rule-bound element in Emergence that he wants to associate with common human ideas about God without trying to lend any credence to anthropomorphic, sentimental or superstitious God-notions. He tries to demonstrate how there may be scientific laws that govern emergences so that certain kinds of complexification might have been more inevitable than we think. It's an interesting exploration from a level-headed scientist/natural philosopher who is passionate about his subject and envisions science as a great unifier, and the human capacity to look back at all of the complexity that has come about since the beginning of time and try to understand some of it as the greatest feat of the universe so far.

[George Mills · Rating 3 out of 5]

The topic is as fascinating as any and the author gives a very thorough description of how the insights of the science of emergence are advancing practically every scientific field. However, my eyes began to cross once or twice because of the overly detailed explanations.