
Systems change over time 51
famous dictum of the Gestalt psychologists, “The whole is greater than the
sum of its parts.” Thus some of the ideas described here are more than a
century old, but it was not until the 1980s that social scientists began to
acquire the analytic tools to exploit them fully.
When a whole become greater than the sum of its parts, it is exhibiting
a bottom- up strategy, whereby the elementary parts are in place first, they
interact by some means, and produce a whole that reflect the interactions
that took place. Artificial life simulations capture some scenarios by which
bottom- up emergence could occur. Whereas self- organization ...