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Given any finite and closed chemical reaction system, it is possible to efficiently determine whether or not it contains a `self-sustaining and collectively autocatalytic' subset of reactions, and to find such subsets when they exist.…
Evolutionary change over time in the context of data pipelines is certain, especially with regard to the structure and semantics of data as well as to the pipeline operators. Dealing with these changes, i.e. providing long-term maintenance,…
This paper develops some basic principles to study autocatalytic networks and exploit their structural properties in order to characterize their inherent fundamental limits and tradeoffs. In a dynamical system with autocatalytic structure,…
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…
A large variety of complex systems in ecology, climate science, biomedicine and engineering have been observed to exhibit tipping points, where the internal dynamical state of the system abruptly changes. For example, such critical…
Autocatalysis is a deceptively simple concept, referring to the situation that a chemical species $X$ catalyzes its own formation. From the perspective of chemical kinetics, autocatalysts show a regime of super-linear growth. Given a…
Adaptive networks appear in many biological applications. They combine topological evolution of the network with dynamics in the network nodes. Recently, the dynamics of adaptive networks has been investigated in a number of parallel…
To analyze the evolutionary emergence of structural complexity in physical processes we introduce a general, but tractable, model of objects that interact to produce new objects. Since the objects--\emph{$epsilon$-machines}--have well…
Economists model knowledge use and acquisition as a cause-and-effect calculus associating observations made by a decision-maker about their world with possible underlying causes. Knowledge models are well-established for static contexts,…
For years, a main focus of ecological research has been to better understand the complex dynamical interactions between species which comprise food webs. Using the connectance properties of a widely explored synthetic food web called the…
Many classic questions of structural theory concern discrete changes, such as the formation or dissolution of groups, role turnover, or faction realignment. Here, we consider a basic framework combining prior work on change paths and recent…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking plays a fundamental role in many areas of condensed matter and particle physics. A fundamental problem in ecology is the elucidation of the mechanisms responsible for biodiversity and stability. Neutral theory,…
This work develops the concept of temporal network epistemology model enabling the simulation of the learning process in dynamic networks. The results of the research, conducted on the temporal social network generated using the CogSNet…
A canonical formalism and constraint analysis for discrete systems subject to a variational action principle are devised. The formalism is equivalent to the covariant formulation, encompasses global and local discrete time evolution moves…
Systems whose organization displays causal asymmetry constraints, from evolutionary trees to river basins or transport networks, can be often described in terms of directed paths (causal flows) on a discrete state space. Such a set of paths…
Self-sustaining autocatalytic networks play a central role in living systems, from metabolism at the origin of life, simple RNA networks, and the modern cell, to ecology and cognition. A collectively autocatalytic network that can be…
The emergence of self-sustaining autocatalytic networks in chemical reaction systems has been studied as a possible mechanism for modelling how living systems first arose. It has been known for several decades that such networks will form…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
In previous work I proposed a framework for thinking about open-ended evolution. The framework characterised the basic processes required for Darwinian evolution as: (1) the generation of a phenotype from a genetic description; (2) the…
Ecosystems are complex systems, currently experiencing several threats associated with global warming, intensive exploitation, and human-driven habitat degradation. Such threats are pushing ecosystems to the brink of collapse. Because of a…