# 4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure The most stunning thing living systems and social systems can do is to **change themselves** utterly by creating whole new structures and behaviors. In biological systems that power is called **evolution**. In human society it's called technical advance or social revolution. In systems lingo, it's called **Self-organization**.
Self-organization means **changing any aspect of a system lower on this list**: adding completely new physical structures, such as brains or wings or computers; adding new negative or positive loops: making new rules. **The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience.** A system that can evolve can survive almost any change, by changing itself. The human immune system has the power to develop new responses to (some kinds of) insults it has never before encountered. The human brain can take in new information and pop out completely new thoughts.
The Power of Self-Organization seems so wondrous that we tend to regard it as mysterious, miraculous, manna from heaven. Economists often model technology as literal manna, coming from nowhere, costing nothing, increasing the productivity of an economy by some steady percent each year. For centuries, people have regarded the spectacular variety of nature with the same awe. Only a divine creator could bring forth such a creation.
Further investigation of Self-Organizing Systems reveals that the divine creator, if there is one, did not have to produce evolutionary miracles. He, she, or it just had to write marvelously clever _**rules for self-organization**_. These rules basically govern how, where, and what the system can add onto or subtract from itself under what conditions. As hundreds of self-organizing computer models have demonstrated, complex and delightful patterns can evolve from quite simple evolutionary algorithms. (That need not mean that real-world algorithms are simple, only that they can be.) **The genetic code within the DNA that is the basis of all biological evolution contains just four different "letters", combined into "words" of three letters each.** That pattern, and the rules for replicating and rearranging it, has been constant for something like three billion years, during which it has spewed out an unimaginable variety of failed and successful self-evolved creatures.
Self-organization is basically the combination of an evolutionary raw material--a highly variable stock of information from which to **select possible patterns** and a, means for **experimentation**, for selecting and testing new patterns. For biological evolution the raw material is DNA, one **source of variety** is spontaneous mutation, and the testing mechanism is something like punctuated Darwinian selection. For technology, the raw material is the body of understanding people have accumulated and stored in libraries and in brains. The source of variety is human **creativity** (whatever that is) and the **Selection Mechanism** can be whatever the market will reward or whatever governments and foundations will fund or whatever meets human needs or solves an immediate problem.
When you understand the power of system self-organization, you begin to understand why biologists worship biodiversity even more than economists worship technology. The wildly varied stock of DNA, evolved and accumulated over billions of years, is the source of evolutionary potential, just as science libraries and labs and universities where scientists are trained are the source of technological potential. Allowing species to go extinct is a **systems crime**, just as randomly eliminating all copies of particular science journals, or particular kinds of scientists, would be.
The same could be said of human cultures, of course, which are the store of behavioral repertoires, accumulated over not billions, but hundreds of thousands of years. They are a stock out of which social evolution can arise. Unfortunately, people appreciate the precious evolutionary potential of cultures even less than they understand the preciousness of every genetic variation in the world's ground squirrels. I guess that's because one aspect of almost every culture is the belief in the utter superiority of that culture.
Insistence on a single culture shuts down learning. Cuts back resilience. Any system, biological, economic, or social, that becomes so encrusted that it cannot self-evolve, a system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet.