Related papers: Case Study of Novelty, Complexity, and Adaptation …
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…
Dynamics maintaining diversity of cell types in a multi-cellular system are studied in relationship with the plasticity of cellular states. First, we introduce a new theoretical framework, reaction-diffusion system on `chemical species…
Many living and non-living complex systems can be modeled and understood as collective systems made of heterogeneous components that self-organize and generate nontrivial morphological structures and behaviors. This chapter presents a brief…
The emergence of multicellularity and developmental programs are among the major problems of evolutionary biology. Traditionally, research in this area has been based on the combination of data analysis and experimental work on one hand and…
Through extensive studies of dynamical system modeling cellular growth and reproduction, we find evidence that complexity arises in multicellular organisms naturally through evolution. Without any elaborate control mechanism, these systems…
Dynamics maintaining diversity of cell types in a multi-cellular system are studied in relationship with the plasticity of cellular states. By adopting a simple theoretical framework for intra-cellular chemical reaction dynamics with…
Life systems are complex and hierarchical, with diverse components at different scales, yet they sustain themselves, grow, and evolve over time. How can a theory of such complex biological states be developed? Here we note that for a…
How multicellular life forms evolved out from unicellular ones constitutes a major problem in our understanding of the evolution of our biosphere. A recent set of experiments involving yeast cell populations has shown that selection for…
Evolutionary transitions occur when previously-independent replicating entities unite to form more complex individuals. Such transitions have profoundly shaped natural evolutionary history and occur in two forms: fraternal transitions…
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…
The evolution of various competing cell types in tissues, and the resulting persistent tissue population, is studied numerically and analytically in a particle-based model of active tissues. Mutations change the properties of cells in…
The capacity to adapt can greatly influence the success of systems that need to compensate for damaged parts, learn how to achieve robust performance in new environments, or exploit novel opportunities that originate from new technological…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology and Artificial Life (Bonner, 1988; Bedau et al., 2000). Complexification has been interpreted in different ways: as a process of diversification between evolving units…
We simulate an individual-based model that represents both the phenotype and genome of digital organisms with predator-prey interactions. We show how open-ended growth of complexity arises from the invariance of genetic evolution operators…
Molecular biology features numerous complexes of proteins that coordinate in an interlocking fashion to fulfill different functions. Adaptive evolution explains some of this complexity, but needn't be the default when neutral explanations…
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…
Understanding and modelling the complexity of the immune system is a challenge that is shared by the ImmunoComplexiT$^1$ thematic network from the RNSC. The immune system is a complex biological, adaptive, highly diversified, self-organized…
A full accounting of biological robustness remains elusive; both in terms of the mechanisms by which robustness is achieved and the forces that have caused robustness to grow over evolutionary time. Although its importance to topics such as…
The nature and source of evolutionary trends in complexity is difficult to assess from the fossil record, and the driven vs. passive nature of such trends has been debated for decades. There are also questions about how effectively…
Cellular heterogeneity is an immanent property of biological systems that covers very different aspects of life ranging from genetic diversity to cell-to-cell variability driven by stochastic molecular interactions, and noise induced cell…