A typical emergence stylized diagram, showing the model that “life” emerged 3.8 billion years ago, via some unstated mechanism, per citation of dating bacteria fossils, and that “consciousness” emerged, as an emergent property, some 200 million years ago, per citation of John Eccles (1992). [16]

“We chemists perceive the origin of life as a chemical process. How did that chemistry begin? I believe the answer will be found in the realm of physics, and more specifically biophysics, defined as the physical processes associated with the living state. The chemistry of life only became possible after certain physical processes permitted specific chemical reactions to occur. Life can emerge where physics and chemistry intersect. I used the word ‘emerge’, [here] which increasingly influences how scientists think about the origin of life. In common usage, ‘emergence’ is an unexpected happening, as in an emergency. ‘Emergence’ is not being used in science to connote the process by which a physical or chemical process becomes more complex under the influence of energy. There is a certain mysterious quality to the word’s use in this regard because the emergent property is typically unexpected and cannot be predicted. Emergence is the opposite of reductionism, in which everything is believed to be explainable by understanding ever simpler components of a system.”

— David Deamer (2011), First Life [17]

“The question of emergence: is it really true that there are new kinds of laws that govern complex systems? Yes, of course, in the sense that different levels of experience call for description and analysis in different terms. The same is just as true for chemistry as for chaos. But fundamental new kinds of laws? Gleick’s lynch mob provides a counterexample.”

“Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of the co-operant forces; their sum, when their directions are the same—their difference, when their directions are contrary. Further, every resultant is clearly traceable in its components, because these are homogeneous and commensurable. It is otherwise with emergents, when, instead of adding measurable motion to measurable motion, or things of one kind to other individuals of their kind, there is a co-operation of things of unlike kinds. The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference.”

“No doubt the properties of silver chloride are completely determined by those of silver and of chlorine; in the sense that whenever you have a whole composed of these two elements in certain proportions and relations you have something which the characteristic properties of silver chloride.”

“Suppose that this hypothetical experiment could be realized, which seems not unlikely, and suppose we could discover a whole chain of phenomena [evolution timeline], leading by imperceptible gradations form the simplest chemical molecule to the most highly developed organism [human molecule]. Would we then say that my preparation of this volume [Anatomy of Science] is only a chemical reaction [extrapolate up approach], or, conversely that a crystal is thinking [extrapolate down approach] about the concepts of science?”

“Nothing could be more absurd, and I once more express the hope that in attacking the infallibility of categories I have not seemed to intimate that they are the less to be respected because they are not absolute. The interaction between two bodies is treated by methods of mechanics; the interaction of a billion such bodies must be treated by the statistical methods of thermodynamics.”

A 2009 "emergence" seminar poster.

“They are the same bodies and presumably follow the same behavior, but a great group of new phenomena emerges when we study an immense number, and by this we must mean merely that phenomena appear that never would have been recognized of dreamed of if the two bodies alone had been studied.”

“Whenever we encounter a clash of ontologies attempting to explain the mind-body relationship, the issue of emergence is always in the background, if not actually the central issue of the debate. Materialists claim, for example, that consciousness emerges through evolution from insentient matter; emanationists idealists say that multiplicity of forms emerge from the onvolution of spirit; the panexperientialists say that different qualities of experience and consciousness evolve and emerge at different levels of complexity; whereas only dualists avoid the issue of emergence altogether because for them the mind belongs in a completely different ontological domain.”

“Scientists have long been baffled by the existence of spontaneous order in the universe. The laws of thermodynamics seem to dictate the opposite, that nature should inexorably degenerate toward a state of disorder, greater entropy. Yet all around us we see magnificent structures—galaxies, cells, ecosystems, human beings—that have somehow managed to assemble themselves. This enigma bedevils all of science today. The key to unlocking the mysteries of self-organization, according to Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine and his colleagues, lies in a deeper understanding of thermodynamics, where emergence of order is a victorious uphill battle against entropy, as a complex system feeds itself on energy flowing in from the environment.”