Related papers: Exploring Evolved Multicellular Life Histories in …
In multi-cellular organisms, cells differentiate into multiple types as they divide. States of these cell types, as well as their numbers, are known to be robust to external perturbations; as conceptualized by Waddington's epigenetic…
Biological organisms adapt to changes by processing informations from different sources, most notably from their ancestors and from their environment. We review an approach to quantify these informations by analyzing mathematical models of…
Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs,…
This paper presents a real-time simulation involving ''protozoan-like'' cells that evolve by natural selection in a physical 2D ecosystem. Selection pressure is exerted via the requirements to collect mass and energy from the surroundings…
In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of…
Researchers have proposed that the distinction between so-called "simple" and "complex" societies can be expressed by an increase in the number of levels at which functional organization, interaction, and thus selection, operate. In spite…
We study the evolution of the network properties of a populated network embedded in a genotype space characterised by either a low or a high number of potential links, with particular emphasis on the connectivity and clustering. Evolution…
Natural evolution has produced a tremendous diversity of functional organisms. Many believe an essential component of this process was the evolution of evolvability, whereby evolution speeds up its ability to innovate by generating a more…
It is still not understood how similar genomic sequences have generated diverse and spectacular forms during evolution. The difficulty to bridge phenotypes and genotypes stems from the complexity of multicellular systems, where thousands of…
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…
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…
Cellular differentiation and evolution are stochastic processes that can involve multiple types (or states) of particles moving on a complex, high-dimensional state-space or "fitness" landscape. Cells of each specific type can thus be…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…
Mathematical and computational models can assist in gaining an understanding of cell behavior at many levels of organization. Here, we review models in the literature that focus on eukaryotic cell motility at 3 size scales: intracellular…
How do mammalian cells that share the same genome exist in notably distinct phenotypes, exhibiting differences in morphology, gene expression patterns, and epigenetic chromatin statuses? Furthermore how do cells of different phenotypes…
Cell type (e.g. pluripotent cell, fibroblast) is the end result of many complex processes that unfold due to evolutionary, developmental, and transformational stimuli. A cell's phenotype and the discrete, a priori states that define various…
A common trait of complex systems is that they can be represented by means of a network of interacting parts. It is, in fact, the network organisation (more than the parts) what largely conditions most higher-level properties, which are not…
We discuss a simple model of co-evolution. In order to emphasise the effect of interaction between individuals the entire population is subjected to the same physical environment. Species are emergent structures and extinction, origination…
Our knowledge of how individual cells self-organize to form complex multicellular systems is being revolutionized by a data outburst, coming from high-throughput experimental breakthroughs such as single-cell RNA sequencing and spatially…
We propose a generic model of eco-systems, with a {\it hierarchical} food web structure. In our computer simulations we let the eco-system evolve continuously for so long that that we can monitor extinctions as well as speciations over…