ABSTRACT
The emergence of life is based on adaptive evolutionary processes that accumulate information about the physical, ecological, and social environment, and on this basis develop appropriate responses to them. Because true complexity is based in modular hierarchical structures, this is a process of emergence of successive higher levels of structure and behaviour on evolutionary, developmental, and functional timescales. Generic principles for handling complexity underlie how this happens: one must have a modular hierarchical structure with abstraction and information hiding for complexity to emerge. These principles are derived on the one hand by analysing biological structure and function, and on the other from practical experience in actually constructing genuinely complex systems. The implication is that genuine emergence must have occurred in order to enable information and structures that are causally effective to come into being out of the random kinds of fluctuations that occurred on the Last Scattering Surface in the universe.
