ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the importance of a systems biology approach. One of the major goals of systems biology is to find appropriate ways of diagramming and mathematically describing the specific, complex interactions within and between living cells. The concept of self-organization implies the existence of a dynamical interdependence between the molecular interactions at the microscopic level and the emerging global structure at the macroscopic level. Emergence is essentially connected to the intrinsic and peculiar complexity of living systems. Systems biology has been recently characterized by most molecular biologists as the integration of knowledge from diverse biological components and data into models of the system as a whole. An important aspect of emergent properties is that they have their own causal power, which is not reducible to the power of their constituents. There are various forms of downward causation that regulate lower-level components in biological systems.
