The universal principles of self-organization and the unity of Nature and knowledge

It is argued that diverse complex adaptive systems, such as proteins, cells, organisms, organizations, societies and ecosystems, all together constitute one developing, multiscale continuum-economy composed of interacting and interdependent adaptive organizational forms that co-exist and co-evolve at different spatiotemporal scales, forming a nested set of interdependent organizational hierarchies. When reconceptualized in equivalent terms of selforganizing adaptive networks of energy/matter/information exchanges, complex systems of different scales appear to exhibit universal scale-invariant patterns in their organization and dynamics, suggesting the self-similarity of spatiotemporal scales and fractal organization of the living matter continuum. The self-organization of biomolecules into cells, cells into organisms and organisms into societies and ecosystems is presented here in terms of a universal scale-invariant organizational process driven by economy and assisted by memory and innovation. It is driven by economy as individual adaptive organizations compete and cooperate at every scale in their efforts to maximize the rate and efficiency of energy/matter/information extraction from their environments and the rate and efficiency of negative entropy production. Evolutionary memory, manifested as organizational structure balancing economic efficiency and adaptability, and innovation, manifested as stochastic generation of new organizational forms, facilitate economy-driven selforganization. Self-organization is proposed to be an ever-expanding process covering increasingly larger spatiotemporal scales through formation of interdependent organizational hierarchies. The process of self-organization blends Darwinian phases dominated by diversification, competition, and selection and organizational phases dominated by specialization, cooperation, and organization. It is argued and illustrated that the self-similarity of spatiotemporal scales in the organization and dynamics of living matter can be exploited both for scientific discovery within specialized disciplines and the unification of individual sciences within one and the same conceptual framework of self-organization. This is achieved by 1) defining scale-invariant organizational concepts, patterns and measures; 2) reconceptualizing organizational phenomena of different scales in the same scale-invariant terms and 3) mapping the knowledge structures of different scales onto each other, using overlapping patterns for alignment, filling in missing parts, and re-structuring misaligned patterns on the assumption of spatiotemporal self-similarity of scales.