After the 1920s emergentism went into retreat, because of the success of mechanistic approaches to genetics following the discovery of genes and the molecular structure of DNA with Watson and Crick in the 1950s. Also it was thought that psychology should be based on behaviorism, a mechanical approach emulating the method of physics.
But in the 1960s emergentism revived with neuroscientist Roger Sperry who
rejected a purely reductionist view of human consciousness and argued that mind emerges from, though is not identical with, brain function and, moreover, it possesses causal powers and so is not a mere epiphenomenon, or inactive by-product, of the brain.
Then Karl Popper and John Eccles argued that many of the properties of the living world are emergent.
Consciousness itself was characterized as 'an emergent property of animals arising under the pressure of natural selection', and the self-conscious mind of human beings was... 'an emergent product of the brain.'
But biology maintained a reductionist orthodoxy that everything was chemistry. But then C.H.Waddington proposed that "organisms must be studied as whole beings" and his student Brian Goodwin proposed that "order in living beings emerges by a process of self-organization and that new and more complex beings which emerge possess capacities that are not reducible."
Thus Terrence Deason writes that the atoms in our body may once been inanimate bits of matter.
Nevertheless together in your living body they now share a mode of existence that is quite distinctive and discontinuous from their separated inanimate existences.
This holism, that organisms are more than the sum of their parts, went nuclear in 1975 with physicist Fritjof Capra and The Tao of Physics. He argued that the basis of quantum theory had been anticipated in "Eastern philosophical traditions." In The Turning Point Capra asked us "to see the world, not as a collection of particles, but as a seamlessly connected whole."
This sort of paradigm shift had been anticipated in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn and his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He argued that science advances not just by incremental discovery but also sudden transformation, an "unpredictable emergence of something new."
Reductionism and determinism still have their place, but meanwhile the holistic approach is becoming dynamic, expanding from the static analysis of how "complex wholes are constituted but with the ways they evolve, adapt, self-organize" and emerge. Not that anyone has come up with a "science of complexity."
And emerging from this is the notion of "self-organization." For a living system is self-organizing. And adaptive.
Another facet of the idea of emergence is a revision of understanding of chaos. The traditional meaning is Platonic, that order is the consequence of the impostion of order on chaos. But in the emergence era, it has shifted, that
a complex phenomenon such as a weather system or a living organism may be intrisincally deterministic and will demonstrate orderly patterns of behavior overall, but in detail, their behavior in undecidable.
They "are suspended uncertainly between order and chaos" and it is "this randomness which gives to chaotic systems a creative potential". This provides a way to explain nature's "remarkable capacity for producing an infinitely varied world of great, if fragile, order and beauty."
Canonical examples of emergence as explanation include the Big Bang creation story, and the day-to-day experience of "fluidity, color, temperature and friction", the differences in behavior between elements and chemical compounds, and the creation of life, the economy, and language. However, present science has established that the properties of chemical compounds "can be explained by the properties of electrons" as established by quantum mechanics.
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