Second, said Holland, a complex adaptive system has many levels of organization, with agents at any one level serving as the building blocks for agents at a higher level. A group of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids will form a cell, a group of cells will form a tissue, a collection of tissues will form an organ, an association of organs will form a whole organism, and a group of organisms will form an ecosystem. In the brain, one group of neurons will form the speech centers, another the motor cortex, and still another the visual cortex. And in precisely the same way, a group of individual
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