Related papers: Biology is a constructive physics
Using data from gene expression databases on various organisms and tissues, including yeast, nematodes, human normal and cancer tissues, and embryonic stem cells, we found that the abundances of expressed genes exhibit a power-law…
Biological systems reach organizational complexity that far exceeds the complexity of any known inanimate objects. Biological entities undoubtedly obey the laws of quantum physics and statistical mechanics. However, is modern physics…
Zipf's law, and power laws in general, have attracted and continue to attract considerable attention in a wide variety of disciplines - from astronomy to demographics to software structure to economics to linguistics to zoology, and even…
With a view to connecting random mutation on the molecular level to punctuated equilibrium behavior on the phenotype level, we propose a new model for biological evolution, which incorporates random mutation and natural selection. In this…
The classification of life should be based upon the fundamental mechanism in the evolution of life. We found that the global relationships among species should be circular phylogeny, which is quite different from the common sense based upon…
Basic problems in complex systems are surveyed in connection with Life. As a key issue for complex systems, complementarity between syntax/rule/parts and semantics/behavior/whole is stressed. To address the issue, a constructive approach…
We propose and study a class-expansion/innovation/loss model of genome evolution taking into account biological roles of genes and their constituent domains. In our model numbers of genes in different functional categories are coupled to…
Ecology studies biodiversity in its variety and complexity. It describes how species distribute and perform in response to environmental changes. Ecological processes and structures are highly complex and adaptive. In order to quantify…
Jim Shapiro synthesizes a great many observations about the mechanisms of evolution to reach the remarkable conclusion that large-scale modification, exchange, and rearrangement of the genome are common and should be viewed as fundamental…
Time evolution of number of species (genera, families, and others), population of them, and size distribution of present ones and life times are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each genetic taxon increases by a (random)…
We develop a ``unified'' model that describes both ``micro'' and ``macro'' evolutions within a single theoretical framework. The eco-system is described as a dynamic network; the population dynamics at each node of this network describes…
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 study the probabilities of evolution based on random mutations and natural selection. We conclude that evolution to multicellular eukaryots, or even prokaryots, is unlikely to be the result of only random mutations. Complex organisms…
The grand challenges in biology today are being shaped by powerful high-throughput technologies that have revealed the genomes of many organisms, global expression patterns of genes and detailed information about variation within…
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…
Life has a special status, it even has its own science: biology. In many ways, the logic of life seems to differ from that of atoms, molecules, planets, or any other `inanimate object'. However, life is increasingly measured using…
A theoretical study of cell evolution is presented here. By using a toolbox containing an intracellular catalytic reaction network model and a mutation-selection process, four distinct phases of self-organization were unveiled. First, the…
A set of scaling laws, based on the stochastic motions of the granular components of astronomical systems, is applied to a cosmological model with a positive cosmological constant. It follows that the mass of the dominant particle in the…
Zipf's law, which states that the probability of an observation is inversely proportional to its rank, has been observed in many domains. While there are models that explain Zipf's law in each of them, those explanations are typically…
Composition is a powerful principle for systems biology, focused on the interfaces, interconnections, and orchestration of distributed processes to enable integrative multiscale simulations. Whereas traditional models focus on the structure…