Related papers: Physical foundations of biological complexity
In physics, I noticed subjects not explained by formulas were often not studied, like how uncontrolled growth systems changed form. Weather, businesses, societies, environments, communities, cultures, groups, relationships, lives, and…
Biofilms are complex, self-organized consortia of microorganisms that produce a functional, protective matrix of biomolecules. Physically, the structure of a biofilm can be described as an entangled polymer network which grows and changes…
Our understanding of evolution is shaped strongly by how we conceive of its fundamental causes. In the original Modern Synthesis, evolution was defined as a process of shifting the frequencies of available alleles at many loci affecting a…
We define a novel quantitative strategy inspired by the ecological notion of nestedness to single out the scale at which innovation complexity emerges from the aggregation of specialized building blocks. Our analysis not only suggests that…
Reaction systems are discrete dynamical systems inspired by bio-chemical processes, whose dynamical behaviour is expressed by set-theoretic operations on finite sets. Reaction systems thus provide a description of bio-chemical phenomena…
This paper attempts to make feasible the evolutionary emergence of novelty in a supposedly deterministic world which behavior is associated with those of the mathematical dynamical systems. The work was motivated by the observation of…
The existence of life is one of the most fundamental problems of astrophysics. The intriguing existence of progressively complex and apparently improbable living beings should be a general tendency of life in the Universe. We are looking…
The concept of Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) was proposed in an attempt to explain the widespread appearance of power-law in nature. It describes a mechanism in which a system reaches spontaneously a state where the characteristic events…
Competitive systems can exhibit both hierarchical (transitive) and cyclic (intransitive) structures. Despite theoretical interest in cyclic competition, which offers richer dynamics, and occupies a larger subset of the space of possible…
The recent discovery of universal principles underlying many complex networks occurring across a wide range of length scales in the biological world has spurred physicists in trying to understand such features using techniques from…
Although most networks in nature exhibit complex topology the origins of such complexity remains unclear. We introduce a model of a growing network of interacting agents in which each new agent's membership to the network is determined by…
The question how complex systems become more organized and efficient with time is open. Examples are, the formation of elementary particles from pure energy, the formation of atoms from particles, the formation of stars and galaxies, the…
One of the longest standing open problems in science is how life arises from non-living matter. If it is possible to measure this transition in the lab, then it might be possible to understand the physical mechanisms by which the emergence…
The unreduced, universally nonperturbative analysis of arbitrary many-body interaction process reveals the irreducible, purely dynamic source of randomness. It leads to the universal definition of real system complexity (physics/9806002),…
We explain how hierarchical organization of biological systems emerges naturally during evolution, through a transition in the units of individuality. We will show how these transitions are the result of competing selective forces operating…
At the heart of many contemporary theories of life is the concept of biological self-organisation: organisms have to continuously produce and maintain the conditions of their own existence in order to stay alive. The way in which these…
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a…
The pursuit of creating artificial intelligence (AI) mirrors our longstanding fascination with understanding our own intelligence. From the myths of Talos to Aristotelian logic and Heron's inventions, we have sought to replicate the marvels…
Top-down causation has been suggested to occur at all scales of biological organization as a mechanism for explaining the hierarchy of structure and causation in living systems. Here we propose that a transition from bottom-up to top-down…
While modern physics and biology satisfactorily explain the passage from the Big Bang to the formation of Earth and the first cells to present-day life, respectively, the origins of biochemical life still remain an open question. Since…