Related papers: Evolutionary Transitions and Top-Down Causation
The concept of (auto)catalytic systems has become a cornerstone in understanding evolutionary processes in various fields. The common ground is the observation that for the production of new species/goods/ideas/elements etc. the…
The concept of evolutionary development of structures constituted a \emph{real} revolution in biology: it was possible to understand how the very complex structures of life can arise in an out-of-equilibrium system. The investigation of…
A tendency in biological theorizing is to formulate principles above or equal to Evolution by Variation and Selection of Darwin and Wallace. In this letter I analyze one such recent proposal which did so for the developmental ascendency. I…
The study of causal structure in complex systems has gained increasing attention, with many recent studies exploring causal networks that capture cause-effect relationships across diverse fields. Despite increasing empirical evidence…
The co-evolution of structure and dynamics, known as adaptivity, is a fundamental property in various systems and drives diverse emergent behaviors. However, the adaptivity in previous works is primarily stemmed from pairwise situations,…
We explore the evolution of cooperation in the framework of the evolutionary game theory using the prisoner's dilemma as metaphor of the problem. We present a minimal model taking into account the growing process of the systems and…
In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…
To analyze the evolutionary emergence of structural complexity in physical processes we introduce a general, but tractable, model of objects that interact to produce new objects. Since the objects--\emph{$epsilon$-machines}--have well…
Causality has become a fundamental approach for explaining the relationships between events, phenomena, and outcomes in various fields of study. It has invaded various fields and applications, such as medicine, healthcare, economics,…
Cooperation plays a fundamental role in societal and biological domains, and the population structure profoundly shapes the dynamics of evolution. Practically, individuals behave either altruistically or egoistically in multiple groups,…
A general and basic model of primordial evolution--a soup of reacting finitary and discrete processes--is employed to identify and analyze fundamental mechanisms that generate and maintain complex structures in prebiotic systems. The…
A dynamical theory for the evolution of the genetic code is presented, which accounts for its universality and optimality. The central concept is that a variety of collective, but non-Darwinian, mechanisms likely to be present in early…
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…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
At what level does selective pressure effectively act? When considering the reproductive dynamics of interacting and mutating agents, it has long been debated whether selection is better understood by focusing on the individual or if…
Recent studies have investigated various dynamic processes characterizing collective behaviors in real-world systems. However, these dynamics have been studied individually in specific contexts. In this article, we present a holistic…
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…
Recent studies have shown that novel collective behaviors emerge in complex systems due to the presence of higher-order interactions. However, how the collective behavior of a system is influenced by the microscopic organization of its…
Models in which causation arises from higher level structures as well as from microdynamics may be relevant to unifying quantum theory with classical physics or general relativity. They also give a way of defining a form of panprotopsychist…
A defining property of complex systems is that they have multiscale structure. How does this multiscale structure come about? We argue that within systems there emerges a hierarchy of scales that contribute to a system's causal workings. An…