Flow Geometry and the Evolution of Collective Organization: Individuals, Couples, Series and Huddles

Abstract

Extraordinarily varied patterns of structure, function and relationship emerge and co-evolve over nested scales of organization in living systems. These patterns recur in cells, individuals, species and ecosystems. Their evolution depends on the generation and sustainability of diversity, not its progressive elimination in favour of what is specially privileged or advantaged. It truly does ‘take all kinds to make a world’, whether that ‘world’ is an individual cell, an assemblage of cells, an assemblage of individuals, an assemblage of populations, an assemblage of communities or the limitless space of Nature everywhere, which includes all distinguishable localities of place and time. This diversity ultimately arises simply and intrinsically from the relationship between receptive space and informative flux as source of all distinguishable natural bodily forms, and how these forms in turn relate to one another. In biological systems, it emerges within the receptive medium of water. Organisms are hence better understood as embodied water flows in mutual relationship with one another than as genetically controlled machines. Natural diversity comes without the intervention of any central or external administrative agency. It is orderly but not rigidly ordered, being neither random nor preordained, but fluid.