While that review does seem to present a bit of a surface description, your own examples seem to go more into the organic aspects. Organisms and ecosystems.

I think though, there are a lot more layers to peel away. One of the points I make repeatedly is that our past to future linear notion of time is an artifact of the fact that as mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our sense of time is the present going past to future. Obviously the basis of culture and civilization, as narrative and history.

Yet the evident fact is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

So the energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

What this has to do with the relationship between nodes and networks, is the degree to which thermodynamics is a more broad based consequence, with the passage of time more of a measure and effect, like temperature. Rates versus degrees.

So then the nodes emerge out of the feedback loops and recede as they turn negative.

as these linear, goal oriented creatures in this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, we haven't really come to terms with the implications of the earth being round, not flat.

It would seem the nature of structure is centripetal. Consider galaxies in terms of the light/energy radiating out, while the structure/gravity coalesces in.

Then think the signals our minds pick out of the noise are what resonates and synchronizes with our prior knowledge, like rings of a tree, building on the prior growth ring. Yet starting with childhood memories, when we were most emotional and least informed. Religions are like the childhood memories of cultures. That core, like the grain of sand at the center of the pearl, that serves as the locus of all that follows.

So while we might narratively structure our information linearly, it is more a process of expansion and consolidation.

Yet what we shed, the excess "noise," goes back out into that larger reality, like the light radiating away from galaxies, creating that larger networking, where everything balances out.

So synchronization pulling in, as the nodes, while harmonization of everything ultimately balancing out. The networking.

We exist as these very complex feedback loops, between the black holes at the center and the black body radiation smeared across infinity. Focus and chill.

I know I sort of went overboard here, but I'm just trying to dig down through some of the layers.