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What is information, physically, and why does it so reliably emerge in living, cultural, and technological systems? Existing theories quantify uncertainty, cost, or compressibility, but do not identify which physical structures count as…
Reaction networks are systems in which the populations of a finite number of species evolve through predefined interactions. Such networks are found as modeling tools in many biological disciplines such as biochemistry, ecology,…
Life is fundamentally a scientific enigma. The interplay between chaos, entropy dynamics, and Prigogine's dissipative systems offers profound insights into the emergence, stabilization, and eventual collapse of far-from-equilibrium systems.…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
In this paper, we wish to investigate the dynamics of information transfer in evolutionary dynamics. We use information theoretic tools to track how much information an evolving population has obtained and managed to retain about different…
Reduction of information entropy along with ever-increasing complexity are among the key signatures of living matter. Understanding the onset of such behavior in early prebiotic world is essential for solving the problem of origins of life.…
The recent interest in human dynamics has led researchers to investigate the stochastic processes that explain human behaviour in different contexts. Here we propose a generative model to capture the essential dynamics of survival analysis,…
Dynamic processes in complex networks are crucial for better understanding collective behavior in human societies, biological systems, and the internet. In this paper, we first focus on the continuous Markov-based modeling of evolving…
Many social and biological systems are characterized by enduring hierarchies, including those organized around prestige in academia, dominance in animal groups, and desirability in online dating. Despite their ubiquity, the general…
Predictive statistical mechanics is a form of inference from available data, without additional assumptions, for predicting reproducible phenomena. By applying it to systems with Hamiltonian dynamics, a problem of predicting the macroscopic…
In complex systems, the interplay between nonlinear and stochastic dynamics, e.g., J. Monod's necessity and chance, gives rise to an evolutionary process in Darwinian sense, in terms of discrete jumps among attractors, with punctuated…
We typically observe large-scale outcomes that arise from the interactions of many hidden, small-scale processes. Examples include age of disease onset, rates of amino acid substitutions, and composition of ecological communities. The…
The recent interest in human dynamics has led researchers to investigate the stochastic processes that explain human behaviour in various contexts. Here we propose a generative model to capture the dynamics of survival analysis,…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
We study the stochastic dynamics of a system of interacting species in a stochastic environment by means of a continuous-time Markov chain with transition rates depending on the state of the environment. Models of gene regulation in systems…
It is generally recognized that a distinguishing feature of life is its peculiar capability to avoid equilibration. The origin of this capability and its evolution along the timeline of abiogenesis is not yet understood. We propose to study…
We present new theoretical and empirical results on the probability distributions of species persistence times in natural ecosystems. Persistence times, defined as the timespans occurring between species' colonization and local extinction…
The task of modelling and forecasting a dynamical system is one of the oldest problems, and it remains challenging. Broadly, this task has two subtasks - extracting the full dynamical information from a partial observation; and then…
Stochastic chains represent a wide and key variety of phenomena in many branches of science within the context of Information Theory and Thermodynamics. They are typically approached by a sequence of independent events or by a memoryless…
Living systems exhibit a range of fundamental characteristics: they are active, self-referential, self-modifying systems. This paper explores how these characteristics create challenges for conventional scientific approaches and why they…