Related papers: Life at the edge: complexity and criticality in bi…
A key unresolved question in microbial ecology is how the extraordinary diversity of microbiomes emerges from the behaviour of individual populations. This process is driven by the cross-feeding networks that structure these communities,…
Classical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics describe systems in which nothing interacts with nothing. Even the highly refined theory of simple fluids does not deal very well with electrical interactions, boundary conditions, or…
Measurement in biological systems became a subject of concern as a consequence of numerous reports on limited reproducibility of experimental results. To reveal origins of this inconsistency, we have examined general features of biological…
Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…
We propose a novel definition of life in terms of which its emergence in the universe is expected, and its ever-creative open-ended evolution is entailed by no law. Living organisms are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic Closure,…
In this short report the first attempt of a new approach to the still mysterious phenomenon of the life, and its peak, the human being, is presented from the view point of the natural sciences, i.e. of the physics in the broad sense of the…
The world is changing at an ever-increasing pace. And it has changed in a much more fundamental way than one would think, primarily because it has become more connected and interdependent than in our entire history. Every new product, every…
Abrupt shifts in ecosystems, brains, markets, and climate are often diagnosed as signs of approaching a tipping point, i.e. a critical bifurcation where stability is lost. Here we reveal a broader and more deceptive mechanism:…
Behavioural differences may arise in the absence of genetic or environmental variation. Chaotic dynamics may influence behavioural development, and so this among-individual variation. We discuss methods and experimental designs to test this…
Biological phenomena differ significantly from physical phenomena. At the heart of this distinction is the fact that biological entities have computational abilities and thus they are inherently difficult to predict. This is the reason why…
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…
Complex systems fail. I argue that failures can be a blueprint characterizing living organisms and biological intelligence, a control mechanism to increase complexity in evolutionary simulations, and an alternative to classical fitness…
Recent years have witnessed the detection of an increasing number of complex organic molecules in interstellar space, some of them being of prebiotic interest. Disentangling the origin of interstellar prebiotic chemistry and its connection…
Short-term survival and an exuberant plunge into building our future are generating a new kind of unintended consequence -- hidden fragility. This is a direct effect of the sophistication and structural complexity of the socio-technical…
Until presently, most approaches for understanding physiological or pathological phenomena have been based on the assumption that these processes start from individual cells, a concept introduced primarily by Virchow in the 19th century.…
Life occurs in concentrated `Ringer Solutions' derived from seawater that Lesser Blum studied for most of his life. As we worked together, Lesser and I realized that the questions asked of those solutions were quite different in biology…
Complex networks are ubiquitous: a cell, the human brain, a group of people and the Internet are all examples of interconnected many-body systems characterized by macroscopic properties that cannot be trivially deduced from those of their…
The social brain hypothesis postulates the increasing complexity of social interactions as a driving force for the evolution of cognitive abilities. Whereas dyadic and triadic relations play a basic role in defining social behaviours and…
We review possible measures of complexity which might in particular be applicable to situations where the complexity seems to arise spontaneously. We point out that not all of them correspond to the intuitive (or "naive") notion, and that…
This article presents a naturalist approach to cognition understood as a network of info-computational, autopoietic processes in living systems. It provides a conceptual framework for the unified view of cognition as evolved from the…