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Metabolism displays striking and robust regularities in the forms of modularity and hierarchy, whose composition may be compactly described. This renders metabolic architecture comprehensible as a system, and suggests the order in which…
The Hadean, once thought to be uninhabitable and tumultuous, has more recently been recontextualized as a clement time in which oceans, land, and life likely appeared on Earth. This non-exhaustive chapter follows multiple threads from…
This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
Living organisms process information to interact and adapt to their changing environment with the goal of finding food, mates or averting hazards. The structure of their niche has profound repercussions by both selecting their internal…
Coexistence of order and fluidity in soft matter often mimics that in biology, allowing for complex dynamics and applications like displays. In active soft matter, emergent order can arise because of such dynamics. Powered by local energy…
While biological crystallization processes have been studied on the microscale extensively, models addressing the mesoscale aspects of such phenomena are rare. In this work, we investigate whether the phase-field theory developed in…
We explore the origins of slow dynamics, aging and glassy rheology in soft and living matter. Non-diffusive slow dynamics and aging in materials characterised by crowding of the constituents can be explained in terms of structural…
Evolution is the theory that plants and animals today have come from kinds that have existed in the past. Scientists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace dedicate their life to observe how species interact with their environment, grow,…
The emergence of complex patterns of organization close to the Cambrian boundary is known to have happened over a (geologically) short period of time. It involved the rapid diversification of body plans and stands as one of the major…
Mesoscopic theory for soft-matter systems that combines density functional and statistical field theory is derived from the microscopic theory by a systematic coarse-graining procedure. Within the framework of this theory we obtain the…
We develop a cluster dynamical mean field theory of the periodic Anderson model in three dimensions, taking a cluster of two sites as a basic reference frame. The mean field theory displays the basic features of the Doniach phase diagram: a…
In complex systems, the interplay between nonlinear and stochastic dynamics, e.g., J. Monod's necessity and chance, gives rise to an evolutionary process in Darwinian sense, in terms of discrete jumps among attractors, with punctuated…
The origin of life is often framed primarily as a chemical problem, yet life's defining feature is evolution. Advances in geochemistry, prebiotic chemistry, and molecular biology have produced diverse scenarios for the emergence of genomes,…
Living systems transmit heritable information using the replicating gene sequences and the cycling regulators assembled around gene sequences. Here I develop a framework for heredity and development that includes the cycling regulators…
We distinguish a mechanical representation of the world in terms of point masses with positions and momenta and the chemical representation of the world in terms of populations of different individuals, each with intrinsic stochasticity,…
Modern biological tools have made it possible to unequivocally demonstrate the deep relationship among species in terms of genes and basic molecular mechanisms. In addition, results from genetic, physical and physiological approaches…
Intercellular exchange networks are essential for the adaptive capabilities of populations of cells. While diffusional exchanges have traditionally been difficult to map, recent advances in nanotechnology enable precise probing of exchange…
Metabolic networks are complex systems that comprise hundreds of chemical reactions which synthesize biomass molecules from chemicals in an organism's environment. The metabolic network of any one organism is encoded by a metabolic…
The evolution of enzyme production is studied analytically using ideas of the group selection theory for the evolution of altruistic behavior. In particular, we argue that the mathematical formulation of Wilson's structured deme model ({\it…