Note that this is not saying that emergence occurs when the parts cancel one another out. To the contrary, the parts are aggregating in complex and interesting ways. What they create, the emergent phenomena, has a statistical signature of its own, one that can be predicted more parsimoniously without looking at all of the parts. The concept of emergence has thus made the transition from a metaphor to a measure, from something that could only be identified by ocular magic to something that can be captured using standard statistics.
