Continuing their gathering together of related material into mini-portals Science and Theology News have a new section on the concept of emergence and emergent systems. See Science & Theology News – Emergence.

Emergence theorists are not all of one mind, but they do agree that nature’s complex structures — from proteins to cells to brains — are more than simple combinations of their parts. Rather, they “emerged” from lower to higher levels of reality. This means that each level of reality is in some way “richer” than what came before.

This fits in nicely with the previous posting (Greenflame: Emergent systems & the church (revisited)) and might provide some background to the paper linked to there.