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This short text summarizes the work in biology proposed in our book, Perspectives on Organisms, where we analyse the unity proper to organisms by looking at it from different viewpoints. We discuss the theoretical roles of biological time,…
Computer modelling for evolutionary systems consists in: 1) to store in the memory the individual features of each member of a large population; and 2) to update the whole system repeatedly, as time goes by, according to some prescribed…
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a…
It is demonstrated in the context of the simple one-dimensional example of a barrier in an infinite well, that highly complex behavior of the time evolution of a wave function is associated with the almost degeneracy of levels in the…
Demographic data and recent experiments verify earlier predictions that mortality has short (few percent of the life span) memory of the previous life history, may be significantly decreased, reset to its value at a much younger age, and…
Two species with similar resource requirements respond in a characteristic way to variations in their habitat -- their abundances rise and fall in concert. We use this idea to learn how bacterial populations in the microbiota respond to…
Living systems continuously transform matter and energy through the chemical processes that constitute their metabolism. The overall metabolic rate of an organism correlates positively with its body mass, however both the exact scaling…
Life has a special status, it even has its own science: biology. In many ways, the logic of life seems to differ from that of atoms, molecules, planets, or any other `inanimate object'. However, life is increasingly measured using…
Mixed microbial communities, usually composed of various bacterial and fungal species, are fundamental in a plethora of environments, from soil to human gut and skin. Their evolution is a paradigmatic example of intertwined dynamics, where…
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…
Many complex systems experience damage accumulation which leads to aging, manifest as an increasing probability of system collapse with time. This naturally raises the question of how to maximize health and longevity in an aging system at…
Habitability is a measure of an environment's potential to support life, and a habitable exoplanet supports liquid water on its surface. However, a planet's success in maintaining liquid water on its surface is the end result of a complex…
Complex systems fail. I argue that failures can be a blueprint characterizing living organisms and biological intelligence, a control mechanism to increase complexity in evolutionary simulations, and an alternative to classical fitness…
There has been on-going philosophical debate on whether artificial life models, also known as digital organisms, are truly alive. The main difficulty appears to be finding an encompassing and definite definition of life. By examining…
The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…
Imagine a world where beauty and technology move in perfect harmony, revealing tiny masterpieces hidden in the water. This world is Nature, and diatoms are the stars. Masters of assembling complex hierarchical glass structures, these…
The aim of this paper is to underline conditions necessary for the emergence and development of life. They are placed at local planetary scale, at Galactic scale and within the cosmological evolution, as pointed out by the Anthropic…
Evolution and development operate at different timescales; generations for the one, a lifetime for the other. These two processes, the basis of much of life on earth, interact in many non-trivial ways, but their temporal hierarchy --…
The metabolic activity of microbes has played an essential role in the evolution and persistence of life on Earth. Microbial metabolism plays a primary role in the flow of carbon, nitrogen and other elements through the biosphere on a…
In the search for life beyond our Solar system, attention should be focused on those planets that have the potential to maintain habitable conditions over the prolonged periods of time needed for the emergence and expansion of life as we…