Related papers: Physical foundations of biological complexity
Many living and non-living complex systems can be modeled and understood as collective systems made of heterogeneous components that self-organize and generate nontrivial morphological structures and behaviors. This chapter presents a brief…
Self-organization is the generation of order out of local interactions in non-equilibrium [1]. It is deeply connected to all fields of science from physics, chemistry to biology where functional living structures self-assemble[2] and…
Enzymes are on the front lines of evolution. All living organisms rely on highly efficient, specific enzymes for growth, sustenance, and reproduction; and many diseases are a consequence of a mutation on an enzyme that affects its catalytic…
Over the last decade, significant progress has been made in understanding complex biological systems, however there have been few attempts at incorporating this knowledge into nature inspired optimization algorithms. In this paper, we…
Natural protein molecules are exceptional polymers. Encoded in apparently random strings of amino-acids, these objects perform clear physical tasks that are rare to find by simple chance. Accurate folding, specific binding, powerful…
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…
Physicists study a wide variety of phenomena creating new interdisciplinary research fields by applying theories and methods originally developed in physics in order to solve problems in economics, social science, biology, medicine,…
Molecules provide the ultimate language in terms of which physiology and pathology must be understood. Myriads of proteins participate in elaborate networks of interactions and perform chemical activities coordinating the life of cells. To…
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…
Self-organisation lies at the core of fundamental but still unresolved scientific questions, and holds the promise of de-centralised paradigms crucial for future technological developments. While self-organising processes have been…
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…
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,…
We argue for a convergence of crystallography, materials science and biology, that will come about through asking materials questions about biology and biological questions about materials, illuminated by considerations of information. The…
Based on laboratory based growth of plant-like structures from inorganic materials, we present new theory for the emergence of plant structure at a range of scales dictated by levels of ionization (charge density), which can be traced…
The original sandpile model of Bak, Tang and Wiesenfeld from 1987 has inspired lots of consequent work and further ideas of how to describe the birth of scale-invariant statistics in various systems and in particular models. In this article…
We investigate the self-organising behaviour of Digital Ecosystems, because a primary motivation for our research is to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. We extended a definition for the complexity, grounded…
A quite general interaction process of a multi-component system is analysed by the extended effective potential method liberated from usual limitations of perturbation theory or integrable model. The obtained causally complete solution of…
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…
Introduced by the late Per Bak and his colleagues, self-organized criticality (SOC) has been one of the most stimulating concepts to come out of statistical mechanics and condensed matter theory in the last few decades, and has played a…
The notion of Self-organized criticality (SOC) had been conceived to interpret the spontaneous emergence of long range correlations in nature. Since then many different models had been introduced to study SOC. All of them have few common…