Related papers: Field-control, phase-transitions, and life's emerg…
Many driven systems alternate between bursts of activity and quiescence and can become trapped in an absorbing state, such as complete inactivity in reaction-diffusion processes or extinction in predator-prey dynamics. It is generally…
The transformation of organic molecules into the simplest self-replicating living system,a microorganism, is accomplished from a unique event or rare events that occurred early in the Universe. The subsequent dispersal on cosmic scales and…
We present here a system of self-propelled particles that follow a very simple motion law in continuous space in a deterministic and asynchronous way. This system of particles is capable of producing, depending on the particle density in…
The origin of macroscopic complexity is traced in a wide range of systems (imunology, ecology, finance, marketing, etc) to the discrete and auto-catalytic (i.e. multiplicative) character of their elementary components. Even in the simplest…
Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…
The origin of life is shrouded in mystery, with few surviving clues, obscured by evolutionary competition. Previous reviews have touched on the complementary approaches of top-down and bottom-up synthetic biology to augment our…
Dynamical criticality has been shown to enhance information processing in dynamical systems, and there is evidence for self-organized criticality in neural networks. A plausible mechanism for such self-organization is activity dependent…
Scale-free dynamics in physical and biological systems can arise from a variety of causes. Here, we explore a branching process which leads to such dynamics. We find conditions for the appearance of power laws and study quantitatively what…
The concept of percolation is combined with a self-consistent treatment of the interaction between the dynamics on a lattice and the external drive. Such a treatment can provide a mechanism by which the system evolves to criticality without…
We explain how hierarchical organization of biological systems emerges naturally during evolution, through a transition in the units of individuality. We will show how these transitions are the result of competing selective forces operating…
This work presents a 2.5-dimensional simulation study of the instability of current-sheets located in a medium with a strong density variation along the current layer. The initial force-free configuration is observed to undergo a two-stage…
Materials undergoing both phase separation and chemical reactions (defined here as all processes that change particle type or number) form an important class of non-equilibrium systems. Examples range from suspensions of self-propelled…
Self-organised criticality (SOC) has been suggested as a potentially powerful unifying paradigm for interpreting the structure of, and signals from, accretion systems. After reviewing the most promising sites where SOC might be observable,…
A simple model economy with locally interacting producers and consumers is introduced. When driven by extremal dynamics, the model self-organizes {\em not} to an attractor state, but to an asymptote, on which the economy has a constant rate…
Living systems exhibit a range of fundamental characteristics: they are active, self-referential, self-modifying systems. This paper explores how these characteristics create challenges for conventional scientific approaches and why they…
One of the leading theories for the origin of life includes the hypothesis according to which life would have evolved as cooperative networks of molecules. Explaining cooperation$-$and particularly, its emergence in favoring the evolution…
The fast-slow dynamics of an eco-evolutionary system are studied, where we consider the feedback actions of environmental resources that are classified into those that are self-renewing and those externally supplied. We show although these…
A multispecies artificial ecosystem is formulated using cellular automata with species interactions and food chain hierarchy. The constructed finite state automaton can simulate the complexity and self-organized characteristics of the…
Large scale organization in ensembles of events of atmospheric convection can be generated by the combined effect of forcing and of the interaction between the raising plumes and the environment. Here the "large scale" refers to the space…
A new cellular automaton (CA) model is presented for the self-organized criticality (SOC) in recurrent bursts of soft gamma repeaters (SGRs), which are interpreted as avalanches of reconnection in the magnetosphere of neutron stars. The…