Related papers: Randomness and Multi-level Interactions in Biology

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…

Biological systems, unlike physical or chemical systems, are characterized by the very inhomogeneous distribution of their components. The immune system, in particular, is notable for self-organizing its structure. Classically, the dynamics…

We provide a brief survey of quantum statistical characterisations of order, disorder and coherence in systems of many degrees of freedom. Here, order and coherence are described in terms of symmetry breakdown, while disorder is described…

Network of nonlinear dynamical elements often show clustering of synchronization by chaotic instability. Relevance of the clustering to ecological, immune, neural, and cellular networks is discussed, with the emphasis of partially ordered…

Complementarity is one of the main features underlying the interactions in biological and biochemical systems. Inspired by those systems we propose a model for the dynamical evolution of a system composed by agents that interact due to…

Emergence, the phenomena where a system's micro-scale dynamics facilitate the development of non-trivial, informative higher scales, has become a foundational concept in modern sciences, tying together fields as diverse as physics, biology,…

Cyclic, nonhierarchical interactions among biological species represent a general mechanism by which ecosystems are able to maintain high levels of biodiversity. However, species coexistence is often possible only in spatially extended…

When we look at the world around us, we see complex physical systems and emergent phenomena. Emergence occurs when a system is observed to have properties that its parts do not have on their own. These properties or behaviors emerge only…

The complexity of many biological, social and technological systems stems from the richness of the interactions among their units. Over the past decades, a great variety of complex systems has been successfully described as networks whose…

One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…

Recent research on the network modeling of complex systems has led to a convenient representation of numerous natural, social, and engineered systems that are now recognized as networks of interacting parts. Such systems can exhibit a…

Many biological phenomena or social events critically depend on how information evolves in complex networks. However, a general theory to characterize information evolution is yet absent. Consequently, numerous unknowns remain about the…

Random neural networks are dynamical descriptions of randomly interconnected neural units. These show a phase transition to chaos as a disorder parameter is increased. The microscopic mechanisms underlying this phase transition are unknown,…

In this paper we investigate networks whose evolution is governed by the interaction of a random assembly process and an optimization process. In the first process, new nodes are added one at a time and form connections to randomly selected…

How large ecosystems can create and maintain the remarkable biodiversity we see in nature is probably one of the biggest open questions in science, attracting attention from different fields, from Theoretical Ecology to Mathematics and…

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…

Diverse biological networks exhibit universal features distinguished from those of random networks, calling much attention to their origins and implications. Here we propose a minimal evolution model of Boolean regulatory networks, which…

This paper attempts to make feasible the evolutionary emergence of novelty in a supposedly deterministic world which behavior is associated with those of the mathematical dynamical systems. The work was motivated by the observation of…

The biological hierarchy and the differences between living and non-living systems are considered from the standpoint of quantum mechanics. The hierarchical organization of biological systems requires hierarchical organization of quantum…

Many systems in nature, from ferromagnets to flocks of birds, exhibit ordering phenomena on the large scale. In physical systems order is statistically robust for large enough dimensions, with relative fluctuations due to noise vanishing…