Related papers: Towards physical principles of biological evolutio…
Aging is a fundamental aspect of living systems that undergo a progressive deterioration of physiological function with age and an increase of vulnerability to disease and death. Living systems, known as complex systems, require complexity…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an…
Protein evolution underpins life, and understanding its behavior as a system is of great importance. However, our current models of protein evolution are arguably too simplistic to allow quantitative interpretation and prediction of…
Modern biological tools have made it possible to unequivocally demonstrate the deep relationship among species in terms of genes and basic molecular mechanisms. In addition, results from genetic, physical and physiological approaches…
In this paper we will try to provide a formalization of some characteristics of the development of biological systems aiming at the highest level of adequacy: justificative adequacy, that is, not only what we observe (descriptive adequacy)…
A primary motivation for our research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex,…
Societal complexity may be at a historical peak. Distinct from entropy, complexity tends to rise as systems move away from order, crest at an intermediate state, and decline as entropy continues increasing. The use of a thermodynamic…
Since the time of Darwin, scientists have struggled to reconcile the evolution of biological forms in a universe determined by fixed laws. These laws underpin the origin of life, evolution, human culture and technology, as set by the…
The present view of biological phenomena is based on a biochemical paradigm that development of living organisms is defined by information stored in a molecular form as some genetic code. However, new discoveries indicate that biological…
Biological systems perform an astonishing array of dynamical processes -- including development and repair, regulation, behavior and motor control, sensing and signaling, and adaptation, among others. Powered by the transduction of stored…
We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…
The emergence of life from inanimate matter presents a thermodynamic challenge: the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates a global trend towards disorder, yet life constitutes localized pockets of profound organization. This paper presents…
One of the properties that make ecological systems so unique is the range of complex behavioural patterns that can be exhibited by even the simplest communities with only a few species. Much of this complexity is commonly attributed to…
In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of…
A major aim of evolutionary biology is to explain the respective roles of adaptive versus non-adaptive changes in the evolution of complexity. While selection is certainly responsible for the spread and maintenance of complex phenotypes,…
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…
Through extensive studies of dynamical system modeling cellular growth and reproduction, we find evidence that complexity arises in multicellular organisms naturally through evolution. Without any elaborate control mechanism, these systems…
Cosmologists wish to explain how our Universe, in all its complexity, could ever have come about. For that, we assess the number of states in our Universe now. This plays the role of entropy in thermodynamics of the Universe, and reveals…
Life systems are complex and hierarchical, with diverse components at different scales, yet they sustain themselves, grow, and evolve over time. How can a theory of such complex biological states be developed? Here we note that for a…