Related papers: Evolutionary Transitions and Top-Down Causation

It has been claimed that different types of causes must be considered in biological systems, including top-down as well as same-level and bottom-up causation, thus enabling the top levels to be causally efficacious in their own right. To…

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…

Ecological systems are emergent features of ecological and adaptive dynamics of a community of interacting species. By natural selection through the abiotic environment and by co-adaptation within the community, species evolve, thereby…

Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…

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…

One of the basic assumptions implicit in the way physics is usually done is that all causation flows in a bottom up fashion, from micro to macro scales. However this is wrong in many cases in biology, and in particular in the way the brain…

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…

We present three major transitions that occur on the way to the elaborate and diverse societies of the modern era. Our account links the worlds of social animals such as pigtail macaques and monk parakeets to examples from human history,…

Cooperative behaviors are deeply embedded in structured biological and social systems. Networks are often employed to portray pairwise interactions among individuals, where network nodes represent individuals and links indicate who…

It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…

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…

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…

Tiny perturbations may trigger large responses in systems near criticality, shifting them across equilibria. Committed minorities are suggested to be responsible for the emergence of collective behaviors in many physical, social, and…

Organizations face numerous challenges posed by unexpected events such as energy price hikes, pandemic disruptions, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters, and the factors that contribute to organizational success in dealing with such…

We discovered a dynamic phase transition induced by sexual reproduction. The dynamics is a pure Darwinian rule with both fundamental ingredients to drive evolution: 1) random mutations and crossings which act in the sense of increasing the…

The hierarchical topology is a common property of many complex systems. Here we introduce a simple but generic model of hierarchy growth from the bottom to the top. Therein, two dynamical processes are accounted for: agent's promotions to…

We explore the emergence of cooperation in the framework of evolutionary game theory. First we introduce the cooperation problem in a novel way that we believe it have important consequences in how problem is addressed. Then we present a…

Tipping points are critical thresholds of parameters where tiny perturbations can lead to abrupt and large qualitative changes in the systems. Many real-world systems that exhibit tipping behavior can be represented as networks of…

This study introduces a novel theoretical framework, the Stacked Autoencoder Evolution Hypothesis, which proposes that biological evolutionary systems operate through multi-layered self-encoding and decoding processes, analogous to stacked…

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…