The edge of chaos isn t static, it s an ever changing wave upon which the system, to co- evolve, must remain in constant motion. The pedagogic implications for language classes and CALL classes remain the same as for directed mutation. The 'jumps' in saltationism being the leaps in Interlanguage hypothesis testing, and when the language patterns crystallize in the learner s mind, a quantum jump to a higher peak on the fitness landscape is made. Emergence is another term for this, and life, itself, is an example of an emergent phenomenon. The organic seems to have crystallized from the inorganic.
Ontogeny is the study of the development of an adult organism from a single-celled zygote.
Roughly 260 cell-types formed from one fertilized cell. Emergence explains why no little black box of Chomskian UG has ever been located. UG and language typologies are emergent phenomena, self-organized vortexes in the mind, basins of attraction which are set early in a child s developmental life. Per Bak, a physicist working at the Brookhaven Institute, invented the sandpile image for self-organized criticality. As more and more sand is piled onto a table it eventually self-organizes into a pile poised on the edge of criticality.