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Theoretical physicists have been fascinated by the phenomena of life for more than a century. As we engage with more realistic descriptions of living systems, however, things get complicated. After reviewing different reactions to this…
There is a deeply entrenched view in philosophy and physics, the closed systems view, according to which isolated systems are conceived of as fundamental. On this view, when a system is under the influence of its environment this is…
Data Science and Machine learning have been growing strong for the past decade. We argue that to make the most of this exciting field we should resist the temptation of assuming that forecasting can be reduced to brute-force data analytics.…
Statistical mechanics is one of the most powerful and elegant tools in the quantitative sciences. One key virtue of statistical mechanics is that it is designed to examine large systems with many interacting degrees of freedom, providing a…
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…
In this short report the first attempt of a new approach to the still mysterious phenomenon of the life, and its peak, the human being, is presented from the view point of the natural sciences, i.e. of the physics in the broad sense of the…
Complexity remains one of the central challenges in science and technology. Although several approaches at defining and/or quantifying complexity have been proposed, at some point each of them seems to run into intrinsic limitations or…
Mathematicians invented Mathematics to escape from words, but at last they depend on them just as much as everybody else. At the end, all basic definitions will be reliant on words, yet the mathematician believes that he's elevated from…
We argue here about the relevance and the ultimate unity of the Bayesian approach in a neutral and agnostic manner. Our main theme is that Bayesian data analysis is an effective tool for handling complex models, as proven by the increasing…
We propose a novel definition of life in terms of which its emergence in the universe is expected, and its ever-creative open-ended evolution is entailed by no law. Living organisms are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic Closure,…
The origin of life occupies a very important place in the study of the evolution. Its liminal location between life and non-life poses special challenges to researchers who study this subject. Current approaches in studying the origin and…
Mathematics and its relation to the physical universe have been the topic of speculation since the days of Pythagoras. Several different views of the nature of mathematics have been considered: Realism - mathematics exists and is…
Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…
The modeling of complex systems such as ecological or socio-economic systems can be very challenging. Although various modeling approaches exist, they are generally not compatible and mutually consistent, and empirical data often do not…
Due to recent advances in synthetic biology and artificial life, the origin of life is currently a hot topic of research. We review the literature and argue that the two traditionally competing "replicator-first" and "metabolism-first"…
In this essay the ontological structure of reality is explored. The question of reducibility of biology to physics is considered in the context of their ultimate principles. It is shown that biology is an ontologically autonomous science…
A notion of biologic system or just a system implies a functional wholeness of comprising system components. Positive and negative feedback are the examples of how the idea to unite anatomical elements in the whole functional structure was…
Biological phenomena differ significantly from physical phenomena. At the heart of this distinction is the fact that biological entities have computational abilities and thus they are inherently difficult to predict. This is the reason why…
What fascinates us about animal behavior is its richness and complexity, but understanding behavior and its neural basis requires a simpler description. Traditionally, simplification has been imposed by training animals to engage in a…
We present a novel approach to represent ecological systems using reaction networks, and show how a particular framework called Chemical Organization Theory (COT) sheds new light on the longstanding complexity-stability debate. Namely, COT…