> > What the heck are you talking about? Is this a joke of some kind?
> >
> > Stephen
>
> ___________________________________
>
>
> Actually, it's not a joke. I'm just trying to understand the nature of things.
>
> - Have you ever looked at a cloud of gnats?

What you're describing isn't synergy, it's emergence (or, if you prefer, emergent phenomena).

Synergy is when two independent agents do more together than they could apart. It can be as simple as two people working together to carry something heavy, or a human (able to tell what matematical problems need to be solved) using a computer (able to solve those problems very quickly). None of the examples you cite seems more than remotely relevant to the idea of synergy.

Emergence is when complex behaviour grows out of a set of simple rules (for example, the rules governing the swarming of gnats is covered by three simple rules: see http://tinyurl.com/7eqvb).