Related papers: The simple emergence of complex molecular function
Explaining the origin of life requires us to explain how self-replication arises. To be specific, how can a self-replicating entity develop spontaneously from a chemical reaction system in which no reaction is self-replicating? Previously…
Aging is a fundamental aspect of living systems that undergo a progressive deterioration of physiological function with age and an increase of vulnerability to disease and death. Living systems, known as complex systems, require complexity…
We define a novel quantitative strategy inspired by the ecological notion of nestedness to single out the scale at which innovation complexity emerges from the aggregation of specialized building blocks. Our analysis not only suggests that…
The evolution of microbial and viral organisms often generates clonal interference, a mode of competition between genetic clades within a population. In this paper, we show that interference strongly constrains the genetic and phenotypic…
It is well-known that biological phenomena are emergent. Emergent phenomena are quite interesting and amazing. However, they are difficult to be understood. Due to this difficulty, we propose a theory to describe emergence based on a…
A general and basic model of primordial evolution--a soup of reacting finitary and discrete processes--is employed to identify and analyze fundamental mechanisms that generate and maintain complex structures in prebiotic systems. The…
Neural codes appear efficient. Naturally, neuroscientists contend that an efficient process is responsible for generating efficient codes. They argue that natural selection is the efficient process that generates those codes. Although…
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…
Interconnected ensembles of biological entities are perhaps some of the most complex systems that modern science has encountered so far. In particular, scientists have concentrated on understanding how the complexity of the interacting…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
Many examples of cooperation exist in biology. In chemical systems however, which can sometimes be quite complex, we do not appear to observe intricate cooperative interactions. A key question for the origin of life, is then how can…
In order to make a case for or against a trend in the evolution of complexity in biological evolution, complexity needs to be both rigorously defined and measurable. A recent information-theoretic (but intuitively evident) definition…
The evolution of structure in biology is driven by accretion and change. Accretion brings together disparate parts to form bigger wholes. Change provides opportunities for growth and innovation. Here we review patterns and processes that…
An explanatory model for the emergence of evolvable units must display emerging structures that (1) preserve themselves in time (2) self-reproduce and (3) tolerate a certain amount of variation when reproducing. To tackle this challenge,…
Universe structure emerges in the unreduced, complex-dynamic interaction process with the simplest initial configuration (two attracting homogeneous fields, quant-ph/9902015). The unreduced interaction analysis gives intrinsically creative…
Rapid advance of experimental techniques provides an unprecedented in-depth view into complex developmental processes. Still, little is known on how the complexity of multicellular organisms evolved by elaborating developmental programs and…
Despite the obvious advantage of simple life forms capable of fast replication, different levels of cognitive complexity have been achieved by living systems in terms of their potential to cope with environmental uncertainty. Against the…
The present view of biological phenomena is based on a biochemical paradigm that development of living organisms is defined by information stored in a molecular form as some genetic code. However, new discoveries indicate that biological…
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…
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…