Related papers: Life at the edge: complexity and criticality in bi…

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…

We discuss models and data of crowd disasters, crime, terrorism, war and disease spreading to show that conventional recipes, such as deterrence strategies, are often not effective and sufficient to contain them. Many common approaches do…

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…

Hierarchical structure is an essential part of complexity, important notion relevant for a wide range of applications ranging from biological population dynamics through robotics to social sciences. In this paper we propose a simple…

The century of complexity has come. The face of science has changed. Surprisingly, when we start asking about the essence of these changes and then critically analyse the answers, the result are mostly discouraging. Most of the answers are…

One of the properties that make ecological systems so unique is the range of complex behavioural patterns that can be exhibited by even the simplest communities with only a few species. Much of this complexity is commonly attributed to…

It is argued that selection criteria usually referred to as "anthropic conditions" for the existence of intelligent (typical) observers widely adopted in cosmology amount only to preconditions for primitive life. The existence of life does…

Recent cellular-level volumetric brain reconstructions have revealed high levels of anatomic complexity. Determining which structural aspects of the brain to focus on, especially when comparing with computational models and other organisms,…

Biological systems are influenced by fluid mechanics at nearly all spatiotemporal scales. This broad relevance of fluid mechanics to biology has been increasingly appreciated by engineers and biologists alike, leading to continued expansion…

Understanding the origins of complexity is a fundamental challenge with implications for biological and technological systems. Network theory emerges as a powerful tool to model complex systems. Networks are an intuitive framework to…

It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…

The origin of life on Earth via the spontaneous emergence of a protocell prior to Darwinian evolution remains a fundamental open question in physics and chemistry. Here, we develop a conceptual framework based on information theory and…

What do societies, the Internet, and the human brain have in common? They are all examples of complex relational systems, whose emerging behaviours are largely determined by the non-trivial networks of interactions among their constituents,…

Investigation of the critical levels and catastrophes in the complex systems of different nature is useful and perspective. Mathematical modeling and analysis is presented for revealing and investigation of the phenomena and critical levels…

We all are fascinated by the phenomena of intelligent behavior, as generated both by our own brains and by the brains of other animals. As physicists we would like to understand if there are some general principles that govern the structure…

We study open-ended evolution by focusing on computational and information-processing dynamics underlying major evolutionary transitions. In doing so, we consider biological organisms as hierarchical dynamical systems that generate…

The rise of multicellularity in the early evolution of life represents a major challenge for evolutionary biology. Guidance for finding answers has emerged from disparate fields, from phylogenetics to modelling and synthetic biology, but…

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…

A natural phenomenon occurring in a living system is an outcome of the dynamics of the specific biological network underlying the phenomenon. The collective dynamics have both deterministic and stochastic components. The stochastic nature…

A key open question in the study of life is the origin of biomolecular homochirality: almost every life-form on Earth has exclusively levorotary amino acids and dextrorotary sugars. Will the same handedness be preferred if life is found…