Related papers: Evolution of Complexity
The question What is Complexity? has occupied a great deal of time and paper over the last 20 or so years. There are a myriad different perspectives and definitions but still no consensus. In this paper I take a phenomenological approach,…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
A central goal of evolutionary biology is to explain the origins and distribution of diversity across life. Beyond species or genetic diversity, we also observe diversity in the circuits (genetic or otherwise) underlying complex functional…
The existence of life is one of the most fundamental problems of astrophysics. The intriguing existence of progressively complex and apparently improbable living beings should be a general tendency of life in the Universe. We are looking…
How multicellular life forms evolved out from unicellular ones constitutes a major problem in our understanding of the evolution of our biosphere. A recent set of experiments involving yeast cell populations has shown that selection for…
One of the main properties of biological systems is modularity, which manifests itself at all levels of their organization, starting with the level of molecular genetics, ending with the level of whole organisms and their communities. In a…
Complexity is an interdisciplinary concept which, first of all, addresses the question of how order emerges out of randomness. For many reasons matrices provide a very practical and powerful tool in approaching and quantifying the related…
Continuing generation of novelty, complexity, and adaptation are well-established as core aspects of open-ended evolution. However, it has yet to be firmly established to what extent these phenomena are coupled and by what means they…
We analyse the unreduced, nonperturbative dynamics of an arbitrary many-body interaction process with the help of the generalised effective potential method and reveal the well-specified universal origin of change (emergence), time and…
Nowadays the question `what is complexity?' is a challenge to be answered. This question is triggering a great quantity of works in the frontier of physics, biology, mathematics and computer science. Even more when this century has been…
Nature has found one method of organizing living matter, but maybe other options exist -- not yet discovered -- on how to create life. To study the life "as it could be" is the objective of an interdisciplinary field called Artificial Life…
The sciences of complexity present some recurrent themes: the emergence of qualitatively new behaviors in dissipative systems out of equilibrium, the aparent tendency of complex system to lie at the border of phase transitions and…
The origin of life is shrouded in mystery, with few surviving clues, obscured by evolutionary competition. Previous reviews have touched on the complementary approaches of top-down and bottom-up synthetic biology to augment our…
The rising complexity of our terrestrial surrounding is an empirical fact. Details of this process evaded description in terms of physics for long time attracting attention and creating myriad of ideas including non-scientific ones. In this…
Complex systems fail. I argue that failures can be a blueprint characterizing living organisms and biological intelligence, a control mechanism to increase complexity in evolutionary simulations, and an alternative to classical fitness…
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a…
One of the longest standing open problems in science is how life arises from non-living matter. If it is possible to measure this transition in the lab, then it might be possible to understand the physical mechanisms by which the emergence…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
The fast changing reality in technical and natural domains perceived by always more accurate observations has drawn attention on new and very broad class of systems with specific behaviour represented under the common wording complexity.…
All life, including cells and artificial protocells, must integrate diverse molecules into a single unit in order to reproduce. Despite expected pressure to evolve a simple system with the fastest replication speed, the mechanism by which…