This chapter focuses on the idea of cooperation and looks at examples in the “nonliving” world, before beginning to talk about the self-generating systems from which life arose. An important function of cooperation is that it creates a new, quite real, entity out of its cooperating parts.
Crystals of various minerals – and finally snowflakes – are shown to have forms that are “greater than the sum of their parts”. The huge number of identical molecules that compose a crystal can produce a wide variety of crystal forms with the same chemical composition on this larger scale. The differences between snowflakes is the most well known example of this. Moving from static forms we look at two processes in motion. Tidal flats and water waves produce large -scale versions of the sine wave, and even the forms of its interactions, like diffraction and interference.
The narrative of moving forms of cooperation now looks at self- generating systems which have been studied since the early 1900s. Chemical reactions involving numerous self- assembling stages, have been paralleled with computer models that demonstrate complex, self- creating systems. imagining these systems coming together in the white smoker or the shallow pool discussed in the last chapter, gives the next glimpse of the possible origins of life