Related papers: Field-control, phase-transitions, and life's emerg…
We present a general conceptual framework for self-organized criticality (SOC), based on the recognition that it is nothing but the expression, ''unfolded'' in a suitable parameter space, of an underlying {\em unstable} dynamical critical…
The critical brain hypothesis states that there are information processing advantages for neuronal networks working close to the critical region of a phase transition. If this is true, we must ask how the networks achieve and maintain this…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
Explaining the origin of life requires us to explain how self-replication arises. To be specific, how can a self-replicating entity develop spontaneously from a chemical reaction system in which no reaction is self-replicating? Previously…
Following extensive numerical experiments, it has been suggested that the evolution of competing computer programs in artificial life simulations shows signs of being a self-organized critical process. The primary evidence for this claim…
Self-organized criticality (SOC) is widely proposed as a fundamental mechanism for collective behavior, yet its role in objective-driven, heterogeneous adaptive systems underpinning real complex systems remains less understood. We introduce…
We have investigated the essential ingredients allowing a system to show Self Organized Criticality (SOC) in its collective behavior. Using the Bak-Sneppen model of biological evolution as our paradigm, we show that the random microscopic…
The spontaneous emergence of scale invariance, called self-organized criticality (SOC), is often attributed to a second-order absorbing-state phase transition (ASPT). Many real-world systems display SOC, yet extreme events are often…
The emergence of life from inanimate matter presents a thermodynamic challenge: the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates a global trend towards disorder, yet life constitutes localized pockets of profound organization. This paper presents…
In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of…
The growth of world population, limitation of resources, economic problems and environmental issues force engineers to develop increasingly efficient solutions for logistic systems. Pure optimization for efficiency, however, has often led…
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…
Cairns-Smith (2008) has argued for a pre-Darwinian era, with a simpler basis for life's functioning via primitive "crystal genes" (information transfer, kinetic control on metabolic reactions). At the other extreme, guided by the structural…
We study open-ended evolution by focusing on computational and information-processing dynamics underlying major evolutionary transitions. In doing so, we consider biological organisms as hierarchical dynamical systems that generate…
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…
A natural phenomenon occurring in a living system is an outcome of the dynamics of the specific biological network underlying the phenomenon. The collective dynamics have both deterministic and stochastic components. The stochastic nature…
Self-organization is the autonomous assembly of a network of interacting components into a stable, organized pattern. This article shows that the process of self-assembly can be encoded in terms of evolutionary entropy, a statistical…
This paper gives an overview of the use of control systems engineering in synthetic biology, motivated by applications such as cell therapy and cell fate reprogramming for regenerative medicine. A ubiquitous problem in these and other…
Top-down causation has been suggested to occur at all scales of biological organization as a mechanism for explaining the hierarchy of structure and causation in living systems. Here we propose that a transition from bottom-up to top-down…
Living cells inherently reorganize their intracellular structures in response to mechanical cues from their environment. Among these responses, the formation of actin-based stress fibers exhibits a series of structural transitions depending…