Self-Organization

Origins of the concept

The term "self-organizing" was first used by the cybernetician W. Ross Ashby (1947), who asked whether a system could move to a more organized state without outside intervention. Heinz von Foerster (1960) proposed the principle of "order from noise," in which systems use ambient noise and energy to increase their order. The key point is that whole-system patterns appear even though each component interacts only with its neighbors and there is no central designer. The idea is closely related to emergence: emergence focuses on the new properties that appear, self-organization on the process by which that order forms.

Self-organization in physics, chemistry and biology

In isolated systems entropy increases and disorder grows, but Ilya Prigogine showed that in open systems far from equilibrium, with continuous flows of energy and matter, ordered "dissipative structures" such as convection cells and chemical oscillations can arise (Nicolis and Prigogine, 1977); he received the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Hermann Haken (1977) formalized synergetics, in which many components, as in a laser, fall into line with a few "order parameters." Alan Turing (1952) showed that the reaction and diffusion of two chemicals can by themselves produce spots and stripes, and Kondo and Miura (2010) reviewed evidence for this in fish skin and other systems. Camazine et al. (2001) analyzed ant trails, termite mounds and synchronized firefly flashing as self-organization in biological groups, and Kauffman (1993) argued that self-organization is a source of order in evolution alongside natural selection.

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Criticality, computation and society

Bak, Tang and Wiesenfeld (1987) proposed "self-organized criticality," in which systems like sandpiles drive themselves to a critical state and produce avalanches whose sizes follow a power law. Maturana and Varela (1980) defined life through "autopoiesis," the self-production of a system's own components. Applications in engineering include neural networks that learn structure from data on their own, such as Kohonen's (1982) self-organizing maps, and the molecular self-assembly reviewed by Whitesides and Grzybowski (2002). In the social sciences, Hayek (1973) stressed "spontaneous orders" such as markets and language that arose without anyone designing them, connecting to the invisible hand and Schelling's segregation model. Critics note that "self-organization" is often invoked without specifying a mechanism and call for concrete models and measurement.

FAQ

Are self-organization and emergence the same?

They overlap but differ in focus: emergence stresses the new properties that appear at the level of the whole, while self-organization stresses the process by which such order forms without external control.

Does self-organization violate the second law of thermodynamics?

No. Open systems can increase internal order by exporting entropy to their surroundings, so total entropy still increases.

Sources reviewed: 2026-10-26

References

1. Ashby, W. R. (1947). Principles of the self-organizing dynamic system. Journal of General Psychology, 37(2), 125–128.
2. Turing, A. M. (1952). The chemical basis of morphogenesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 237(641), 37–72.
3. von Foerster, H. (1960). On self-organizing systems and their environments. In M. C. Yovits & S. Cameron (Eds.), Self-Organizing Systems (pp. 31–50). London: Pergamon.
4. Nicolis, G., & Prigogine, I. (1977). Self-Organization in Nonequilibrium Systems. New York: Wiley.
5. Haken, H. (1977). Synergetics: An Introduction. Berlin: Springer.
6. Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition. Dordrecht: Reidel.
7. Kohonen, T. (1982). Self-organized formation of topologically correct feature maps. Biological Cybernetics, 43(1), 59–69.
8. Bak, P., Tang, C., & Wiesenfeld, K. (1987). Self-organized criticality: An explanation of the 1/f noise. Physical Review Letters, 59(4), 381–384.
9. Kauffman, S. A. (1993). The Origins of Order. New York: Oxford University Press.
10. Camazine, S., Deneubourg, J.-L., Franks, N. R., Sneyd, J., Theraulaz, G., & Bonabeau, E. (2001). Self-Organization in Biological Systems. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
11. Kondo, S., & Miura, T. (2010). Reaction-diffusion model as a framework for understanding biological pattern formation. Science, 329(5999), 1616–1620.
12. Hayek, F. A. (1973). Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 1: Rules and Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
13. Whitesides, G. M., & Grzybowski, B. (2002). Self-assembly at all scales. Science, 295(5564), 2418–2421.