I don't think there is any need for a programmer, and trying to grasp how that is even possible is the gateway to a whole new appreciation of the way living systems are organized...

But I really cannot talk about self-organization without getting technical (I've been mulling over how to talk about self-organization and economics in lay terms since I first got on this blog and I still haven't figured out how to crack that nut). It's like asking about quantum mechanics but please no complex numbers.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman