[jhedwards]

This reminds me of some conversations I've been having with a friend of mine who is skeptical of "emergence" (or at least the way it is often described). After going over the problem with him for a while I eventually was convinced that emergence is not "more than" the sum of the parts, emergence is _precisely_ the sum of its parts.

Ants produce these higher level patterns not because there's some magical thing that "emerges", but because they are precisely evolved to coordinate with each other to create those patterns.