As the number of members in an environment rise, the emergence of self-government takes place.
From an Asterisk interview: Why We Have Prison Gangs
If you look at smaller prison systems — I was recently in the South Carolina Department of Corrections — they have a much smaller prison population, and they don’t have dominant gangs like those in California. Many of the conditions are the same. They’re both places of confinement. You’re forced to go there. You can’t leave. But there are no gangs emerging in the small ones. The social order that exists in the small ones actually looks a lot like the convict code that existed when California had a smaller prison system. They’re also not as racially segregated in those smaller prisons.
So each of these is consistent with a causal claim that big, diverse communities that can’t rely on official governance tend to form gangs. If you look at clan-based societies, they’re socially organized in a very similar way. And I hadn’t discovered this clan literature until I finished writing my book. But clans form when there are not strong and effective state based institutions, and when groups are large enough that they can’t rely on these informal mechanisms. So there’s a similar phenomena arising in certain times and places like we might expect.
What's interesting is that if you place an ant on a table, it's not going to do much. However, if you place thousands of ants on a table, they'll build a colony and begin controlling temperature.
What's more interesting, consciousness may come about the same way via neurons.
As entropy rises, eventually a form of order emerges.