Related papers: Randomness and Multi-level Interactions in Biology
Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…
We analyse a collection of empirical networks in a wide spectrum of disciplines and show that strong non-normality is ubiquitous in network science. Dynamical processes evolving on non-normal networks exhibit a peculiar behaviour, as…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
We study the statistical underpinnings of life. We question some common assumptions about the thermodynamics of life and illustrate how, contrary to widespread belief, even in a closed system entropy growth can accompany an increase in…
The intrinsic multivaluedness of interaction process, revealed in Part I of this series of papers, is interpreted as the origin of the true dynamical (in particular, quantum) chaos. The latter is causally deduced as unceasing series of…
It is argued that the occurrence of disproportionately ("un-natural") large (or small) numbers, as well as deep cancellations, are comparatively natural traits of the way Nature is geared to operate in most complex systems. The idea is…
While fields like Artificial Life have made huge strides in quantifying the mechanisms that distinguish living systems from non-living ones, particular mechanisms remain difficult to reproduce in silico. Known as open-endedness, we've been…
Randomness plays a central rol in the quantum mechanical description of our interactions. We review the relationship between the violation of Bell inequalities, non signaling and randomness. We discuss the challenge in defining a random…
Coexistence of individuals with different species or phenotypes is often found in nature in spite of competition between them. Stable coexistence of multiple types of individuals have implications for maintenance of ecological biodiversity…
A full accounting of biological robustness remains elusive; both in terms of the mechanisms by which robustness is achieved and the forces that have caused robustness to grow over evolutionary time. Although its importance to topics such as…
According to the standard model of cosmology, the arrangement of matter in the cosmos on scales much larger than galaxies is entirely specified by the initial conditions laid down during inflation. But zooming in by dozens of orders of…
Life is fundamentally a scientific enigma. The interplay between chaos, entropy dynamics, and Prigogine's dissipative systems offers profound insights into the emergence, stabilization, and eventual collapse of far-from-equilibrium systems.…
The vision of Organic Computing addresses challenges that arise in the design of future information systems that are comprised of numerous, heterogeneous, resource-constrained and error-prone components or devices. Here, the notion organic…
A central feature of complex systems is the relevance and entanglement of different levels of description. For instance, the dynamics of ecosystems can be alternatively described in terms of large ecological processes and classes of…
There has been a long debate on how new levels of organization have evolved. It might seem unlikely, as cooperation must prevail over competition. One well-studied example is the emergence of autocatalytic sets, which seem to be a…
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…
The well-defined but intricate course of time evolution exhibited by many naturally occurring phenomena suggests some source of dynamic order sustaining it. In spite of its obviousness as a problem, it has remained absent from the…
Criticality has been proposed as a mechanism for the emergence of complexity, life, and computation, as it exhibits a balance between robustness and adaptability. In classic models of complex systems where structure and dynamics are…
A quite general interaction process of a multi-component system is analysed by the extended effective potential method liberated from usual limitations of perturbation theory or integrable model. The obtained causally complete solution of…
From behavioral sciences to biology to quantum mechanics, one encounters situations where (i) a system outputs several random variables in response to several inputs, (ii) for each of these responses only some of the inputs may "directly"…