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Life depends as much on the flow of information as on the flow of energy. Here we review the many efforts to make this intuition precise. Starting with the building blocks of information theory, we explore examples where it has been…
We consider an evolution of two elementary quantum particles and ask the question: under what conditions such a system behaves as a single object? It is obvious that if the attraction between the particles is stronger than any other force…
Fitness consequence of dispersal depends on property of the entire landscape, which patches are available and what are the cost of moving. These are information that are not available locally when an organism make the decision to disperse.…
We investigate the role of a statistical complexity measure to assign equilibration in isolated quantum systems. While unitary dynamics preserve global purity, expectation values of observables often exhibit equilibration-like behavior,…
For many organisms, the number of sensory neurons is largely determined during development, before strong environmental cues are present. This is despite the fact that environments can fluctuate drastically both from generation to…
The nature and source of evolutionary trends in complexity is difficult to assess from the fossil record, and the driven vs. passive nature of such trends has been debated for decades. There are also questions about how effectively…
The problem of the insensitivity of the macroscopic behavior of any thermodynamical system to partitioning generates a bias between the reproducibility of its macroscopic behavior viewed as the simplest form of causality and its long-term…
Prediction of events is the challenge in many different disciplines, from meteorology to finance; the more this task is difficult, the more a system is {\it complex}. Nevertheless, even according to this restricted definition, a general…
Biological systems are modular, and this modularity evolves over time and in different environments. A number of observations have been made of increased modularity in biological systems under increased environmental pressure. We here…
The statistical properties of an ecosystem composed of species interacting via pairwise, random interactions and deterministic, concentration limiting self-interaction are studied analytically with tools of equilibrium statistical mechanics…
The paper discusses the fundamental characteristics distinguishing the natural and social systems from each other. It considers in detail the basic approaches, prospects, and possibilities of constructing mathematical description for social…
The unpredictability in chaotic scattering problems is a fundamental topic in physics that has been studied either in purely conservative systems or in the presence of weak perturbations. In many systems noise plays an important role in the…
Identifying and understanding modular organizations is centrally important in the study of complex systems. Several approaches to this problem have been advanced, many framed in information-theoretic terms. Our treatment starts from the…
The search for universal laws that help establish a relationship between dynamics and computation is driven by recent expansionist initiatives in biologically inspired computing. A general setting to understand both such dynamics and…
An ecosystem is a nonlinear dynamical system, its orbits giving rise to the observed complexity in the system. The diverse components of the ecosystem interact in discrete time to give rise to emergent features that determine the trajectory…
The diversity and quality of natural systems have been a puzzle and inspiration for communities studying artificial life. It is now widely admitted that the adaptation mechanisms enabling these properties are largely influenced by the…
We study the dynamics of a two-level atom interacting with a Lorentzian structured reservoir considering initial system-environment correlations. It is shown that under strong system-reservoir coupling the dynamics of purity can determine…
We analyze ecological systems that are influenced by random environmental fluctuations. We first provide general conditions which ensure that the species coexist and the system converges to a unique invariant probability measure (stationary…
Statistical physics provides a useful perspective for the analysis of many complex systems; it allows us to relate microscopic fluctuations to macroscopic observations. Developmental biology, but also cell biology more generally, are…
We report the complete statistical treatment of a system of particles interacting via Newtonian forces in continuous boundary-driven flow, far from equilibrium. By numerically time-stepping the force-balance equations of a model fluid we…