Related papers: Diversity Begets Stability in an Evolving Network
A model of an evolving network of interacting molecular species is shown to exhibit repeated rounds of crashes in which several species get rapidly depopulated, followed by recoveries. The network inevitably self-organizes into an…
The recent discovery of universal principles underlying many complex networks occurring across a wide range of length scales in the biological world has spurred physicists in trying to understand such features using techniques from…
The stable functionality of networked systems is a hallmark of their natural ability to coordinate between their multiple interacting components. Yet, strikingly, real-world networks seem random and highly irregular, apparently lacking any…
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 dynamic instability of the living systems and the "superposition" of different forms of randomness are viewed as a component of the contingently increasing organization of life along evolution. We briefly survey how classical and…
The relevance of chaos to evolution is discussed in the context of the origin and maintenance of diversity and complexity. Evolution to the edge of chaos is demonstrated in an imitation game. As an origin of diversity, dynamic clustering of…
Social, biological and economic networks grow and decline with occasional fragmentation and re-formation, often explained in terms of external perturbations. We show that these phenomena can be a direct consequence of simple imitation and…
A dynamical systems scenario for developmental cell biology is proposed, based on numerical studies of a system with interacting units with internal dynamics and reproduction. Diversification, formation of discrete and recursive types, and…
Species or population that proliferate faster than others become dominant in numbers. Catalysis allows catalytic sets within a molecular reaction network to dominate the non catalytic parts of the network by processing most of the available…
The functioning of many biochemical networks is often robust -- remarkably stable under changes in external conditions and internal reaction parameters. Much recent work on robustness and evolvability has focused on the structure of neutral…
On a global level, ecological communities are being perturbed at an unprecedented rate by human activities and environmental instabilities. Yet, we understand little about what factors facilitate or impede long-term persistence of these…
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…
The causes of major and rapid transitions observed in biological macroevolution as well as in the evolution of social systems are a subject of much debate. Here we identify the proximate causes of crashes and recoveries that arise…
Populations of species in ecosystems are often constrained by availability of resources within their environment. In effect this means that a growth of one population, needs to be balanced by comparable reduction in populations of others.…
Robustness to perturbation is a key topic in the study of complex systems occurring across a wide variety of applications from epidemiology to biochemistry. Here we analyze the eigenspectrum of the Jacobian matrices associated to a general…
Biological networks of interacting agents exhibit similar topological properties for a wide range of scales, from cellular to ecological levels, suggesting the existence of a common evolutionary origin. A general evolutionary mechanism…
The increasing volume of ecologically and biologically relevant data has revealed a wide collection of emergent patterns in living systems. Analyzing different datasets, ranging from metabolic gene-regulatory to species interaction…
Most complex systems are nonlinear, relying on emergent behavior from interacting subsystems, often characterized by oscillatory dynamics. Collective oscillatory behavior is essential for the proper functioning of many real world systems.…
Diversity is a fundamental feature of ecosystems, even when the concept of ecosystem is extended to sociology or economics. Diversity can be intended as the count of different items, animals, or, more generally, interactions. There are two…
Biological networks have evolved to be highly functional within uncertain environments while remaining extremely adaptable. One of the main contributors to the robustness and evolvability of biological networks is believed to be their…