Systems Research and Behavioral Science 22, 413-430, 2005 Life and Simple Systems 1 Cottam, Ranson and Vounckx, 2005 LIFE AND SIMPLE SYSTEMS Ron Cottam, Willy Ranson & Roger Vounckx The Evolutionary Processing Group, ETRO Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium Communicating author: Ron Cottam ricottam@etro.vub.ac.be Tel/fax: +32 (2) 629.2933 ABSTRACT This last decade has seen the publication of an extensive literature describing, cataloguing and analyzing the ‘emergence’ of complexity. This seems very strange. The creation of a complex assembly is comparatively easy – the difficult job is to generate simplicity from it. So much is this the case, that the only context within which it takes place is that of life itself. Although we naturally imagine life as a dynamic process rather than as a static structure, both of these are critical to its survival. Continuously expanding multi-element assemblies finally lose their cohesion, and split up into separate parts, or restructure themselves to redress their stability by generating a simplified umbrella-level of operation. In large organisms this process may repeat itself, thus creating a multi-leveled self- correlating operational hierarchy. It is not obvious how the associated generation of simplicity is initiated, but it appears that such a self-correlating hierarchy is itself alive. Keywords: life, hierarchy, multi-scalar, complexity, simplicity. INTRODUCTION One of the preoccupations of Homo sapiens is, and has been to explain in some way the genesis of life, both in an abstract sense and in the appearance of individual organisms. Over the last century there has been a progressive move away from attributing its origin to some external intelligence and towards attempting an explanation from the bases developed in the natural (i.e. mainly ‘inorganic’) ‘exact’ sciences. Unfortunately, to some extent this has been doomed to failure, as these bases were derived for systems in equilibrium, and life is anything but that! More precisely, the standard scientific scenarios comprise systems which remain in equilibrium because their constituent parts are also in equilibrium, while living systems maintain a temporally limited quasi-equilibrium because their constituent parts are individually far from equilibrium. Within the standard scientific scenarios,