A term accredited to Jan C. Smuts (1870-1950) who first used it in the 1920s as the antithesis of radical reductionism, and which is understood to mean that the properties of a system cannot be determined or explained by the sum of its constituent parts alone. Accordingly, systems are hierarchically organized, with the emergence of new properties between its levels of organization. Adopted in the developmental sciences by the likes of Paul Weiss (1898-1989), an embryologist, and other so-called organismic biologists.
See Downward causation (or macrocausation), Emergence, General system theory (GST), Hierarchy, Levels of organization, Reductionism, Whole is greater than the sum of its parts