Community First Theory: How Collective Organization Generates Individual Diversity (opens in new tab)

Takashi Ikegami, Hiroki Kojima, and Akiko Kashiwagi Entropy 2026, 28(5), 523 Collective systems often exhibit emergent behaviors that cannot be reduced to the properties of individual components. A central question is whether individuality itself is a precondition for collective organization, or whether it arises from it. Here we develop and empirically test Community First Theory, which proposes that collective organization is the generative substrate from which individual dynamical identity...