Related papers: Emergent phenomena in living systems: a statistica…

When we look at the world around us, we see complex physical systems and emergent phenomena. Emergence occurs when a system is observed to have properties that its parts do not have on their own. These properties or behaviors emerge only…

Stochastic dynamics is generated by a matrix of transition probabilities. Certain eigenvectors of this matrix provide observables, and when these are plotted in the appropriate multi-dimensional space the phases (in the sense of phase…

This paper attempts to make feasible the evolutionary emergence of novelty in a supposedly deterministic world which behavior is associated with those of the mathematical dynamical systems. The work was motivated by the observation of…

Phase transitions not allowed in equilibrium steady states may happen however at the fluctuating level. We observe for the first time this striking and general phenomenon measuring current fluctuations in an isolated diffusive system. While…

This chapter first presents a rather personal view of some different aspects of predictability, going in crescendo from simple linear systems to high-dimensional nonlinear systems with stochastic forcing, which exhibit emergent properties…

We distinguish a mechanical representation of the world in terms of point masses with positions and momenta and the chemical representation of the world in terms of populations of different individuals, each with intrinsic stochasticity,…

Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…

Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on…

We analyze ecological systems that are influenced by random environmental fluctuations. We first provide general conditions which ensure that the species coexist and the system converges to a unique invariant probability measure (stationary…

We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…

During tissue development, patterns of gene expression determine the spatial arrangement of cell types. In many cases, gradients of secreted signaling molecules - morphogens - guide this process. The continuous positional information…

We study a stochastic model proposed recently in the genetic literature to explain the heterogeneity of cell populations or of gene products. Cells are located in two colonies, whose sizes fluctuate as birth and migration processes in…

Biological activities are often seen entrained onto the day-night and other celestial mechanical cycles (e.g., seasonal and lunar), but studies on the origin of life have largely not accounted for such periodic external environmental…

We study the evolution of artificial learning systems by means of selection. Genetic programming is used to generate a sequence of populations of algorithms which can be used by neural networks for supervised learning of a rule that…

Stochasticity in gene expression can give rise to fluctuations in protein levels and lead to phenotypic variation across a population of genetically identical cells. Recent experiments indicate that bursting and feedback mechanisms play…

We identify a new universality class of phase transitions that arises in non-normal systems, challenging the classical view that transitions require eigenvalue instabilities. In traditional bifurcation theory, critical phenomena emerge when…

When can complex ecological interactions drive an entire ecosystem into a persistent non-equilibrium state, where species abundances keep fluctuating without going to extinction? We show that high-diversity spatially-extended systems, in…

Cell fate determination, the process through which cells commit to differentiated states is commonly mediated by gene regulatory motifs with mutually exclusive expression states. The classical deterministic picture for cell fate…

Fluctuations and noise may alter the behavior of dynamical systems considerably. For example, oscillations may be sustained by demographic fluctuations in biological systems where a stable fixed point is found in the absence of noise. We…

Stochastic resonance is a phenomenon in which fluctuations enhance an otherwise weak signal. It has been found in many different systems in paleoclimatology, biology, medicine, and physics. The classical stochastic resonance due to thermal…