The need for a general explanation of the way that living structure is created

When we look at nature, we can nearly always find an explanation for any one of the fifteen properties as it appears in any one particular instance.

The fifteen properties are necessarily associated with living centers and are the ways in which centers appear in the world, come to life, and cooperate to form other living centers. But that, in itself, does not explain why they keep appearing. We need a more systematic, general explanation.

Although recent developments in complexity theory have shown how linked systems of variables, under the right conditions, will cooperate to form emergent order, that in itself does not yet tell us why the particular kind of order formation I have identified as living structure, keeps on recurring, time after time.
Yet there does, in an enormous number of empirical cases, appear to be a process which produces centers — and above all “living centers” — packed with density of other centers and hence with life. Why do these living centers appear? Why does living structure appear in the world? What is it — in the detailed history of natural systems, with its mechanical causation — that can, step by step, keep on making the fifteen properties appear in general, and that therefore, in general, causes the repeated creation of living structure in the inorganic and organic world?

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/1 The principle of unfolding wholeness in nature#