Related papers: Asking Biological Questions of Physical Systems: t…
The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…
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…
A biological circuit is a neural or biochemical cascade, taking inputs and producing outputs. How have biological circuits learned to solve environmental challenges over the history of life? The answer certainly follows Dobzhansky's famous…
Life depends as much on the flow of information as on the flow of energy. Here we review the many efforts to make this intuition precise. Starting with the building blocks of information theory, we explore examples where it has been…
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…
Many of life's most fascinating phenomena emerge from interactions among many elements--many amino acids determine the structure of a single protein, many genes determine the fate of a cell, many neurons are involved in shaping our thoughts…
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…
Life is a complex biological phenomenon represented by numerous chemical, physical and biological processes performed by a biothermodynamic system/cell/organism. Both living organisms and inanimate objects are subject to aging, a biological…
The genetic blueprint for the essential functions of life is encoded in DNA, which is translated into proteins -- the engines driving most of our metabolic processes. Recent advancements in genome sequencing have unveiled a vast diversity…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
The continuity of life and its evolution, we proposed, emerge from an interactive group process manifested in networks of interaction. We term this process \textit{survival-of-the-fitted}. Here, we reason that survival of the fitted results…
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…
Living organisms have some common structures, chemical reactions and molecular structures. The organisms consist of cells with cell division, they have homochirality of protein and carbohydrate units, and metabolism, and genetics, and they…
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…
Biology-derived algorithms are an important part of computational sciences, which are essential to many scientific disciplines and engineering applications. Many computational methods are derived from or based on the analogy to natural…
The molecular biology revolution of the last seventy five years has transformed our view of living systems. Scientific explanations of biological phenomena are now synonymous with the identification of the genes, proteins, and signaling…
Molecular biology is a nanotechnology that works--it has worked for billions of years and in an amazing variety of circumstances. At its core is a system for acquiring, processing and communicating information that is universal, from…
Life on earth is distinguished by long-lived correlations in time. The patterns of material organization that characterize living organisms today are contingent on events that occurred billions of years ago. This contingency is a necessary…
With the completion of human genome mapping, the focus of scientists seeking to explain the biological complexity of living systems is shifting from analyzing the individual components (such as a particular gene or biochemical reaction) to…
Achieving advanced machine intelligence remains a central challenge in AI research, often approached through scaling neural architectures and generative models. However, biological systems offer a broader repertoire of strategies for…