Related papers: Primordial Evolution in the Finitary Process Soup
When a biological system robustly corrects component-level errors, the direct pressure on component performance declines. Components may become less reliable, maintain more genetic variability, or drift neutrally in design, creating the…
Unravelling current complex food systems is relevant for their adjustment and redesign under the current changing climate conditions. Redesign may be necessitated by migration of people and changes of locations of major agri-food…
The evolution processes of complex systems carry key information in the systems' functional properties. Applying machine learning algorithms, we demonstrate that the historical formation process of various networked complex systems can be…
In this paper we will try to provide a formalization of some characteristics of the development of biological systems aiming at the highest level of adequacy: justificative adequacy, that is, not only what we observe (descriptive adequacy)…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
Many complex systems have been shown to share universal properties of organization, such as scale independence, modularity and self-similarity. We borrow tools from statistical physics in order to study structural preferential attachment…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
We suggest to simulate evolution of complex organisms constrained by the sole requirement of robustness in their expression patterns. This scenario is illustrated by evolving discrete logical networks with epigenetic properties. Evidence…
Many biological processes can be thought of as the result of an underlying dynamics in which the system repeatedly undergoes distinct and abortive trajectories with the dynamical process only ending when some specific process, purpose,…
At an early stage in pre-biotic evolution, groups of replicating molecules must coordinate their reproduction to form aggregated units of selection. Mechanisms that enable this to occur are currently not well understood. In this paper we…
Due to recent advances in synthetic biology and artificial life, the origin of life is currently a hot topic of research. We review the literature and argue that the two traditionally competing "replicator-first" and "metabolism-first"…
Vital to primary visual processing, retinal circuitry shows many similar structures across a very broad array of species, both vertebrate and non-vertebrate, especially functional components such as lateral inhibition. This surprisingly…
The conceptual background for a detailed study of the urban form of the city of Bologna is discussed with a view to modern methodological insight as it is being presented by recent results of complexity theory and the theory of…
A modeling formalism is proposed for the description and study of living and life-like systems. It provides an abstract conceptual model framework for real life and evolution of biological organisms. It is proposed, that this model…
An important feature of many complex systems, both natural and artificial, is the structure and organization of their interaction networks with interesting properties. Here we present a theory of self-organization by evolutionary adaptation…
The fields of Origin of Life and Artificial Life both question what life is and how it emerges from a distinct set of "pre-life" dynamics. One common feature of most substrates where life emerges is a marked shift in dynamics when…
While generic competitive systems exhibit mixtures of hierarchy and cycles, real-world systems are predominantly hierarchical. We demonstrate and extend a mechanism for hierarchy; systems with similar agents approach perfect hierarchy in…
The emergence of life from inanimate matter presents a thermodynamic challenge: the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates a global trend towards disorder, yet life constitutes localized pockets of profound organization. This paper presents…
Researchers have proposed that the distinction between so-called "simple" and "complex" societies can be expressed by an increase in the number of levels at which functional organization, interaction, and thus selection, operate. In spite…
The question how complex systems become more organized and efficient with time is open. Examples are, the formation of elementary particles from pure energy, the formation of atoms from particles, the formation of stars and galaxies, the…