Get two cars, one from the UK and the US, and break it apart and understand it in terms of their components. That analysis might answer some questions about the functioning of these cars, but that analysis alone will not tell you why one has the steering wheel on the left side, and the other has it on the right side. An automobile is not just a sum of its parts. If it was so, hypothetically, you can replace each component of a car with the best components in the world, and you could end up with the best-engineered automobile in the world. But we all know that if we do that, we probably will end up with a lot of junk on our hands. The complexity of a complex adaptive system emerges from the inter-connectivity, interactions, and inter-relationships among the components.
credit - Joseph Anthony.