Related papers: Are biological systems poised at criticality?
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
A complex system is a system composed of many interacting parts, often called agents, which displays collective behavior that does not follow trivially from the behaviors of the individual parts. Examples include condensed matter systems,…
Biological organisms adapt to changes by processing informations from different sources, most notably from their ancestors and from their environment. We review an approach to quantify these informations by analyzing mathematical models of…
In living systems, we often see the emergence of the ingredients necessary for computation -- the capacity for information transmission, storage, and modification -- begging the question of how we may exploit or imitate such biological…
Decision procedures aggregating the preferences of multiple agents can produce cycles and hence outcomes which have been described heuristically as `chaotic'. We make this description precise by constructing an explicit dynamical system…
Many collective systems exist in nature far from equilibrium, ranging from cellular sheets up to flocks of birds. These systems reflect a form of active matter, whereby individual material components have internal energy. Under specific…
In many scientific contexts, different investigators experiment with or observe different variables with data from a domain in which the distinct variable sets might well be related. This sort of fragmentation sometimes occurs in molecular…
This short text summarizes the work in biology proposed in our book, Perspectives on Organisms, where we analyse the unity proper to organisms by looking at it from different viewpoints. We discuss the theoretical roles of biological time,…
Living organisms exhibit remarkable adaptations across all scales, from molecules to ecosystems. We believe that many of these adaptations correspond to optimal solutions driven by evolution, training, and underlying physical and chemical…
The present view of biological phenomena is based on a biochemical paradigm that development of living organisms is defined by information stored in a molecular form as some genetic code. However, new discoveries indicate that biological…
Many complex systems exhibit extreme events far more often than expected for a normal distribution. This work examines how self-similar bursts of activity across several orders of magnitude can emerge from first principles in systems that…
Systems that exhibit complex behaviours are often found in a particular dynamical condition, poised between order and disorder. This observation is at the core of the so-called criticality hypothesis, which states that systems in a…
This work concerns a many-body deterministic model that displays life-like properties as emergence, complexity, self-organization, spontaneous compartmentalization, and self-regulation. The model portraits the dynamics of an ensemble of…
A major issue in biology is the understanding of the interactions between proteins. These interactions can be described by a network, where the proteins are modeled by nodes and the interactions by edges. The origin of these protein…
Physicists study a wide variety of phenomena creating new interdisciplinary research fields by applying theories and methods originally developed in physics in order to solve problems in economics, social science, biology, medicine,…
Proteins, by virtue of their central role in most biological processes, represent one of the key subjects of the study of molecular evolution. Inherent to the indispensability of proteins for living cells is the fact that a given protein…
The goal of Science is to understand phenomena and systems in order to predict their development and gain control over them. In the scientific process of knowledge elaboration, a crucial role is played by models which, in the language of…
We introduce bio-inspired artificial neural networks consisting of neurons that are additionally characterized by spatial positions. To simulate properties of biological systems we add the costs penalizing long connections and the proximity…
From the climate system to the effect of the internet on society, chaotic systems appear to have a significant role in our future. Here a method of statistical learning for a class of chaotic systems is described along with underlying…
As an example of topic where biology and physics meet, we present the issue of protein folding and stability, and the development of thermodynamics-based bioinformatics tools that predict the stability and thermal resistance of proteins and…