This essay, written by my friend Stuart Newman two years ago, might interest you.
I've reformatted it and attached it here as a PDF.
Stuart is a cell biologist at New York Medical College in Valhalla, NY, and is one of the world's key dialectical thinkers in science and biology.
This is not everyone's "cup of tea", but for me everything Stuart investigates and writes is of great interest, so I thought those who are also interested in that topic might discuss it here.
As my brain recovers gradually from three years of "trouble" caused by too little oxygen (due to beta blockers I'd been taking, which slowed my heart too much while I slept) -- and yet somehow I wrote my Monsanto book during that time! -- I've been recovering pieces I'd been working on using the same general philosophical approach, trying to understand what some call "emergent properties" and Chaos theory, and how Life "self-develops" and sorts itself.
It was Stuart Newman -- along with Richard Levins, Martha Herbert, Douglas Hofstadter, Bertell Ollman, Silvia Federici, Kamran Nayeri, Brian Tokar, Howie Cohen, Vandana Shiva, and Petros Evdokas (and tripping a lot on mescaline and acid) got me to thinking for many decades of how what we call "consciousness" emerges from physical clusters of cells, how ecosystems emerge and sustain ..... and how that understanding can be applied to political consciousness / class consciousness as well, although I grant it is a very large leap ....
Mitchel<Emergence of Form & Function.pdf>