English

Fundamental Complexity Measures of Life

Biological Physics 2012-05-01 v1 Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems Other Quantitative Biology

Abstract

At present, there is a great deal of confusion regarding complexity and its measures (reviews on complexity measures are found in, e.g. Lloyd, 2001 and Shalizi, 2006 and more references therein). Moreover, there is also confusion regarding the nature of life. In this situation, it seems the task of determining the fundamental complexity measures of life is especially difficult. Yet this task is just part of a greater task: obtaining substantial insights into the nature of biological evolution. We think that without a firm quantitative basis characterizing the most fundamental aspects of life, it is impossible to overcome the confusion so as to clarify the nature of biological evolution. The approach we present here offers such quantitative measures of complexity characterizing biological organization and, as we will see, evolution.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1204.6670,
  title  = {Fundamental Complexity Measures of Life},
  author = {Attila Grandpierre},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1204.6670},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

49 pages, included a dialogue with Philip Ball