We're writing a paper about open source development. One part reads:

The Linux community resembles a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches out of which a coherent and stable system could emerge only by a miracle. In a way this is the self-organizing property of an adaptive system that can produce quite unexpected results if you let the project evolve according to its own emerging properties.

I did not write this. Do not shoot the messenger.

How can it be better said that, there are many individuals but it doesn't take a miracle to get a coherent and stable system?

Nothing miraculous about it. Most projects have a lead who has the final word on what goes in and what doesn't. For example, Linus Torvalds has the final say on what's in the kernel. Quite frankly that paragraph is a gross distortion of the truth.

If I were grading that baby, you'd get a big, fat F.

I know its wrong, but i'm not much of a writer, that's why i'm asking.
Thanks for your response...hope others will respond, too.

Well, there are several coherent open source projects to which no miracle is owed therefore the point is untenable.

Just say that unlike commercial software, the fact that Linux is open source encourages people to freely tinker with it, thus permitting new ideas to be easily introduced and exchanged. As the best of those new ideas gain acceptance, it essentially establishes a cycle of building upon and improving the work of the original coders (frequently in ways they didn't anticipate) and as a result, some seriously cool and seriously great code can be produced. Like the old saying, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

As Hangdog42 already said, there's no need for any miracles. I hope the rest of the paper reads easier than that one paragraph though

If any "lead" goes against the consensus opinion of the developers involved, what soon follows is called a "fork" of the project. Authoritarians make very short-lived project managers in an open source world.

thanks, that's good stuff