Related papers: Emergent phenomena in living systems: a statistica…
Noise plays a fundamental role in a wide variety of physical and biological dynamical systems. It can arise from an external forcing or due to random dynamics internal to the system. It is well established that even weak noise can result in…
Noise-induced phase transitions are common in various complex systems, from physics to biology. In this article, we investigate the emergence of crucial events in noise-induced phase transition processes and their potential significance for…
Brain rhythms contribute to every aspect of brain function. Here, we study critical and resonance phenomena that precede the emergence of brain rhythms. Using an analytical approach and simulations of a cortical circuit model of neural…
In the scientific literature, the term emergent phenomena is invoked in the context of a collective behavior observed in a complex adaptive system that exhibits no correspondence with the behavior of the system constituents. Although this…
Stochastic phenomena in which the noise amplitude is proportional to the fluctuating variable itself, usually called {\it multiplicative noise}, appear ubiquitously in physics, biology, economy and social sciences. The properties of…
We describe a continuous-time modelling framework for biological population dynamics that accounts for demographic noise. In the spirit of the methodology used by statistical physicists, transitions between the states of the system are…
When a large number of similar entities interact among each other and with their environment at a low scale, unexpected outcomes at higher spatio-temporal scales might spontaneously arise. This nontrivial phenomenon, known as emergence,…
Statistical physics provides a useful perspective for the analysis of many complex systems; it allows us to relate microscopic fluctuations to macroscopic observations. Developmental biology, but also cell biology more generally, are…
Noisy fluctuations are ubiquitous in complex systems. They play a crucial or delicate role in the dynamical evolution of gene regulation, signal transduction, biochemical reactions, among other systems. Therefore, it is essential to…
Strong positive feedback is considered a necessary condition to observe abrupt shifts of ecosystems. A few previous studies have shown that demographic noise -- arising from the probabilistic and discrete nature of birth and death processes…
While noise is generally associated with uncertainties and often has a negative connotation in engineering, living organisms have evolved to adapt to (and even exploit) such uncertainty to ensure the survival of a species or implement…
Biochemical reaction networks are subjected to large fluctuations attributable to small molecule numbers, yet underlie reliable biological functions. Most theoretical approaches describe them as purely deterministic or stochastic dynamical…
Many-variable differential equations with random coefficients provide powerful models for the dynamics of many interacting species in ecology. These models are known to exhibit a dynamical phase transition from a phase where population…
Understanding under what conditions interacting populations, whether they be plants, animals, or viral particles, coexist is a question of theoretical and practical importance in population biology. Both biotic interactions and…
Many of life's most fascinating phenomena emerge from interactions among many elements--many amino acids determine the structure of a single protein, many genes determine the fate of a cell, many neurons are involved in shaping our thoughts…
Noise, through its interaction with the nonlinearity of the living systems, can give rise to counter-intuitive phenomena such as stochastic resonance, noise-delayed extinction, temporal oscillations, and spatial patterns. In this paper we…
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…
I give a highly selective overview of the way statistical mechanics explains the microscopic origins of the time asymmetric evolution of macroscopic systems towards equilibrium and of first order phase transitions in equilibrium. These…
An important characteristic of flocks of birds, school of fish, and many similar assemblies of self-propelled particles is the emergence of states of collective order in which the particles move in the same direction. When noise is added…
Diverse complex dynamical systems are known to exhibit abrupt regime shifts at bifurcation points of the saddle-node type. The dynamics of most of these systems, however, have a stochastic component resulting in noise driven regime shifts…