Self-Organisation

In the last chapter we understood that biological diversity and complexity does not contradict the Second Law of thermodynamics because living organisms are structures that maintain themselves far from equilibrium: They use an inflow of energy to create "order from disorder" within themselves, but dissipate heat and other waste products to increase the net entropy and disorder of the universe. The remarkable self-organisation exhibited by living organisms is also illustrated in simpler non-living systems such as that of Benard cells and the BZ cemical reaction. In this chapter we will look at further examples of self-organisation, that is, macroscopic order or pattern formation in a complex system.