Related papers: Case Study of Novelty, Complexity, and Adaptation …
Biological networks have evolved to be highly functional within uncertain environments while remaining extremely adaptable. One of the main contributors to the robustness and evolvability of biological networks is believed to be their…
Multicellular organisms comprise a diverse collection of stable tissues built from different cell types. It remains unclear how large numbers of interacting cells can precisely coordinate their gene expression during tissue…
Numerosity perception is foundational to mathematical learning, but its computational bases are strongly debated. Some investigators argue that humans are endowed with a specialized system supporting numerical representation; others argue…
In this paper I describe a cellular automaton model of a multi-species ecosystem, suitable for the study of emergent properties of macroevolution. Unlike majority of ecological models, the number of coexisting species is not fixed. Starting…
Development combines three basic processes asymmetric --- cell division, signaling and gene regulation --- in a multitude of ways to create an overwhelming diversity of multicellular life-forms. Here, we attempt to chart this diversity…
Biological systems reach organizational complexity that far exceeds the complexity of any known inanimate objects. Biological entities undoubtedly obey the laws of quantum physics and statistical mechanics. However, is modern physics…
Biological evolution of a population is governed by the fitness landscape, which is a map from genotype to fitness. However, a fitness landscape depends on the organisms environment, and evolution in changing environments is still poorly…
The evolutionary transition to multicellularity transformed life on earth, allowing for the evolution of large, complex organisms. While multicellularity can be strongly advantageous, its earliest stages bring unique physical challenges.…
The application of single-cell molecular profiling coupled with spatial technologies has enabled charting cellular heterogeneity in reference tissues and in disease. This new wave of molecular data has highlighted the expected diversity of…
In this position paper (1) we discuss two particular aspects of Systems of Systems, i.e., variability and evolution. (2) We argue that concepts from Product Line Engineering and Software Evolution are relevant to Systems of Systems…
Complex networks serve as abstract models for understanding real-world complex systems and provide frameworks for studying structured dynamical systems. This article addresses limitations in current studies on the exploration of individual…
The idea that there are any large-scale trends in the evolution of biological organisms is highly controversial. It is commonly believed, for example, that there is a large-scale trend in evolution towards increasing complexity, but…
A common assumption in evolutionary thought is that adaptation drives an increase in biological complexity. However, the rules governing evolution of complexity appear more nuanced. Evolution is deeply connected to learning, where…
Complexity is a multi-faceted phenomenon, involving a variety of features including disorder, nonlinearity, and self-organisation. We use a recently developed rigorous framework for complexity to understand measures of complexity. We…
Throughout the evolution of biological species on Earth, cells and organs have developed many complex structures and processes to ensure their interactions with individual chemical molecules (small and macromolecular) and nanoscale objects…
The mortality rate of many complex multicellular organisms increase with age, which suggests that net aging damage is accumulative, despite remodeling processes. But how exactly do little mishaps in the cellular level accumulate and spread…
Adaptivity is a dynamical feature that is omnipresent in nature, socio-economics, and technology. For example, adaptive couplings appear in various real-world systems like the power grid, social, and neural networks, and they form the…
A central goal of evolutionary biology is to explain the origins and distribution of diversity across life. Beyond species or genetic diversity, we also observe diversity in the circuits (genetic or otherwise) underlying complex functional…
Diversification in a set of solutions has become a hot research topic in the evolutionary computation community. It has been proven beneficial for optimisation problems in several ways, such as computing a diverse set of high-quality…
We demonstrate diversification rather than optimisation for highly interacting organisms in a well mixed biological system by means of a simple model and reference to experiment, and find the cause to be the complex network of interactions…