Related papers: A quantitative definition of organismality and its…
A modeling formalism is proposed for the description and study of living and life-like systems. It provides an abstract conceptual model framework for real life and evolution of biological organisms. It is proposed, that this model…
Our binary intuitive understanding of life and lifelikeness is good enough for daily life, but not for research in the natural sciences. Here we propose an operational definition of lifeness of a particular entity as a scalar, product of…
Biological systems are generally complicated and/or complex. In the former approach, one sets up a model with a large number of parameters to describe the system in detail. The latter approach focuses on understanding the universal aspects…
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…
Living systems are thermodynamically open but closed in their organization. In other words, even though their material components turn over constantly, a material-independent property persists, which we call organization. Moreover,…
At the heart of many contemporary theories of life is the concept of biological self-organisation: organisms have to continuously produce and maintain the conditions of their own existence in order to stay alive. The way in which these…
The intricacy and diversity inherent in living organisms present a formidable obstacle to the establishment of a universally accepted definition. Life manifests in a multitude of forms, exhibiting various attributes such as growth,…
The implications of large-scale coherence in biological systems and possible links to quantum theory are only beginning to be explored. Whether quantum-like coherent phenomena are relevant, or even possible at all, at the high temperatures…
Ecosystems are commonly conceptualized as networks of interacting species. However, partitioning natural diversity of organisms into discrete units is notoriously problematic, and mounting experimental evidence raises the intriguing…
All aspects of our society, including the life sciences, need a mechanism for people working within them to represent the concepts they employ to carry out their research. For the information systems being designed and developed to support…
What makes living systems flexible so that they can react quickly and adapt easily to changing environments? This question has not only engaged biologists for decades but is also of great interest to computer scientists and engineers who…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…
While the engineering of operating systems is well understood, their formal structure and properties are not. The latter needs a clear definition of the purpose of an OS and an identification of the core. In this paper I offer definitions…
Integrative biological simulations have a varied and controversial history in the biological sciences. From computational models of organelles, cells, and simple organisms, to physiological models of tissues, organ systems, and ecosystems,…
The question What is Complexity? has occupied a great deal of time and paper over the last 20 or so years. There are a myriad different perspectives and definitions but still no consensus. In this paper I take a phenomenological approach,…
We discuss the relevance of studying ecology within the framework of Complexity Science from a statistical mechanics approach. Ecology is concerned with understanding how systems level properties emerge out of the multitude of interactions…
In their recent comment, Cockell et al. argue that the habitability of an environment is fundamentally a binary property; that is to say, an environment can either support the metabolic processes of a given organism or not. The habitability…
A model of an organism as an autonomous intelligent system has been proposed. This model was used to analyze learning of an organism in various environmental conditions. Processes of learning were divided into two types: strong and weak…
We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organisation, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: (a) living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by…