Related papers: Physical foundations of biological complexity
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
The standard assumptions that underlie many conceptual and quantitative frameworks do not hold for many complex physical, biological, and social systems. Complex systems science clarifies when and why such assumptions fail and provides…
Life can be viewed as a localized chemical system that sits on, or in the basin of attraction of, a metastable dynamical attractor state that remains out of equilibrium with the environment. Such a view of life allows that new living states…
While fields like Artificial Life have made huge strides in quantifying the mechanisms that distinguish living systems from non-living ones, particular mechanisms remain difficult to reproduce in silico. Known as open-endedness, we've been…
A full accounting of biological robustness remains elusive; both in terms of the mechanisms by which robustness is achieved and the forces that have caused robustness to grow over evolutionary time. Although its importance to topics such as…
The emergence of cosmic structure is commonly considered one of the most complex phenomena in Nature. However, this complexity has never been defined nor measured in a quantitative and objective way. In this work we propose a method to…
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…
Self-organized criticality (SOC) is widely proposed as a fundamental mechanism for collective behavior, yet its role in objective-driven, heterogeneous adaptive systems underpinning real complex systems remains less understood. We introduce…
We propose a dynamical model in which a network structure evolves in a self-organized critical (SOC) manner and explain a possible origin of the emergence of fractal and small-world networks. Our model combines a network growth and its…
We will review some of the theoretical progresses that have been in the study of complex systems in physics and of their applications to biology.
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
Physical emergence - crystals, rocks, sandpiles, turbulent eddies, planets, stars - is fundamentally different from biological emergence - amoeba, cells, mice, humans - even though the latter is based in the former. This paper points out…
Cellular biology exists embedded in a world dominated by random dynamics and chance. Many vital molecules and pieces of cellular machinery diffuse within cells, moving along random trajectories as they collide with the other biomolecular…
The evolution of structure in biology is driven by accretion and change. Accretion brings together disparate parts to form bigger wholes. Change provides opportunities for growth and innovation. Here we review patterns and processes that…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
A phenomenological model of self-organization explaining the emergence of a complexity with features that apparently satisfy the specific criteria usually required for recognizing the appearance of life in laboratory is presented. The…
The growth of world population, limitation of resources, economic problems and environmental issues force engineers to develop increasingly efficient solutions for logistic systems. Pure optimization for efficiency, however, has often led…
If a concept is not well defined, there are grounds for its abuse. This is particularly true of complexity, an inherently interdisciplinary concept that has penetrated very different fields of intellectual activity from physics to…
We simulate an individual-based model that represents both the phenotype and genome of digital organisms with predator-prey interactions. We show how open-ended growth of complexity arises from the invariance of genetic evolution operators…
The network concept is increasingly used for the description of complex systems. Here we summarize key aspects of the evolvability and robustness of the hierarchical network-set of macromolecules, cells, organisms, and ecosystems. Listing…