Related papers: Stephane Leduc and the vital exception in the Life…
This paper proposes a systemic perspective for some aspects of both phylogenesis and ontogenesis, in the light of the notion of biological organization as negative entropy, following some hints by Schroedinger. To this purpose, we introduce…
The grand challenges in biology today are being shaped by powerful high-throughput technologies that have revealed the genomes of many organisms, global expression patterns of genes and detailed information about variation within…
"Epigenetic Tracking" is the name of a model of cellular development that, coupled with an evolutionary technique, becomes an evo-devo (or "artificial embryology", or "computational development") method to generate 2d or 3d sets of…
We show that when we endow the action principle with the overlooked possibility to allow endpoint selection, it gains an enormous additional power, which, perhaps surprisingly, directly corresponds to biological behavior. The biological…
Euler stressed the importance of hypotheses, which he thought were the only means of arriving at a certain knowledge of the physical causes, essential to establish the laws of physics. This thought was communicated to Emilie du Chatelet in…
The blastocoel is a fluid-filled cavity characteristic of animal embryos at the blastula stage. Its emergence is commonly described as the result of cleavage patterning, but this historical view conceals a large diversity of mechanisms and…
Spherical embryos of the algal genus $Volvox$ must turn themselves inside out to complete their embryogenesis. This `inversion', which shares important features with morphological events such as gastrulation in animals, is perhaps the…
According to the universally accepted concept of the development of life on the Earth, multicellular organisms initially emerged as a result of either the union of identical unicellular organisms with the following functional…
A century ago physicists and mathematicians worked in tandem and established quantum mechanism. Indeed, algebras, partial differential equations, group theory, and functional analysis underpin the foundation of quantum mechanism. Currently,…
The rise of multicellularity in the early evolution of life represents a major challenge for evolutionary biology. Guidance for finding answers has emerged from disparate fields, from phylogenetics to modelling and synthetic biology, but…
Most conspicuous organisms are multicellular and most multicellular organisms develop somatic cells to perform specific, non-reproductive tasks. The ubiquity of this division of labor suggests that it is highly advantageous. In this paper,…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
The physiological tradition of biological research analyzes biological systems using reduced descriptions much as an engineer uses a 'black box' description of an amplifier. Simple models have been used by physiologists for a very long…
The origin of life is often approached through the lens of replication, heredity, or molecular specificity. This paper proposes a thermodynamic framework in which the emergence of life is driven by the persistence of reaction pathways that…
Neoteny, also spelled Paedomorphosis, can be defined in biological terms as the retention by an organism of juvenile or even larval traits into later life. In some species, all morphological development is retarded; the organism is…
In this article, I advance the idea that physics plays a central role in cell differentiation and makes fundamental contributions to morphogenesis, revealing the totipotent nature of the zygote. Totipotency is a persistent mechanical memory…
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…
In multicellular organisms, relations among parts and between parts and the whole are contextual and interdependent. These organisms and their cells are ontogenetically linked: an organism starts as a cell that divides producing…
Biology is considered here as an "emergent science" in the sense of Anderson and of Laughlin and Pines. It is demonstrated that a straightforward mathematical definition of "biological system" is useful in showing how biology differs in…
Across metazoans, early embryos exhibit a strikingly conserved slowing down of their cell duplication speed, despite widely varying developmental paces and underlying molecular mechanisms. Here we show that this common behavior arises…