ABSTRACT
The evolutionary trend towards increasing complexity and organization might appear to be in opposition to a well-established law of physics which implies that the Universe as a whole is moving steadily towards increasing disorder. In evolutionary terms the fluctuations appear as periods of instability, or crises, in which organisms are forced either to adapt to the changed environment—perhaps moving on to higher levels of organisations–or be extinguished. An early crisis in the evolution of life possibily occurred when the simple organic compounds on which the first primitive cells fed started running short. The response was the evolution of photosynthesis–the ability to feed directly from sunlight. Western science sometimes finds it difficult to deal with the notion of emergent orders of existence. In other words, for something to be called complex, it must be composed of a number of different elements which are organized in some way, and connected so as to interact with one another.
