CONTINUING EMERGENCE IN LIVING SYSTEMS

As discussed in other articles in this issue, chemical emergence may have led to the appearance of life on the pre-biotic earth, but it is even more obviously clear that emergence continues in living systems, producing complex phenomena such as ordering, biorhythms and even, possibly, consciousness. The role of continuing emergence in living systems is reviewed here with special attention to the Peroxidase–Oxidase reaction and neurochemical systems. For the latter, we review the role of subnetwork dynamics in epilepsy and an intriguing new possiblity that calcium waves in fields of astrocytes in the brain may be involved in the spread of epileptic seizures.