Related papers: Biological Processes as Exploratory Dynamics
Many driven systems alternate between bursts of activity and quiescence and can become trapped in an absorbing state, such as complete inactivity in reaction-diffusion processes or extinction in predator-prey dynamics. It is generally…
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…
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…
We discovered a dynamic phase transition induced by sexual reproduction. The dynamics is a pure Darwinian rule with both fundamental ingredients to drive evolution: 1) random mutations and crossings which act in the sense of increasing the…
Open-ended evolutionary dynamics remains an elusive goal for artificial evolutionary systems. Many ideas exist in the biological literature beyond the basic Darwinian requirements of variation, differential reproduction and inheritance. I…
Human achievements are often preceded by repeated attempts that initially fail, yet little is known about the mechanisms governing the dynamics of failure. Here, building on the rich literature on innovation, human dynamics and learning, we…
We propose a model of multispecies populations surviving on distributed resources. System dynamics are investigated under changes in abiotic factors such as the climate, as parameterized through environmental temperature. In particular, we…
Developmental trajectories are known to be canalized, or robust to both environmental and genetic perturbations. However, even when these trajectories are decanalized by an environmental perturbation outside of the range of conditions to…
The discerning behavior of living systems relies on accurate interactions selected from the lot of molecular collisions occurring in the cell. To ensure the reliability of interactions, binding partners are classically envisioned as finely…
Spatial systems with heterogeneities are ubiquitous in nature, from precipitation, temperature and soil gradients controlling vegetation growth to morphogen gradients controlling gene expression in embryos. Such systems, generally described…
We integrate dual-process theories of human cognition with evolutionary game theory to study the evolution of automatic and controlled decision-making processes. We introduce a model where agents who make decisions using either automatic or…
The concept of evolutionary development of structures constituted a \emph{real} revolution in biology: it was possible to understand how the very complex structures of life can arise in an out-of-equilibrium system. The investigation of…
The far-reaching consequences of ecological interactions in the dynamics of biological communities remain an intriguing subject. For decades, competition has been a cornerstone in ecological processes, but mounting evidence shows that…
Extremal principles are fundamental in our interpretation of phenomena in nature. One of the best known examples is the second law of thermodynamics, governing most physical and chemical systems and stating the continuous increase of…
We formulate a dynamical model for microtubules interacting with a catastrophe-inducing boundary. In this model microtubules are either waiting to be nucleated, actively growing or shrinking, or stalled at the boundary. We first determine…
Microtubules capture chromosomes during mitosis by stochastically switching between growth and shrinkage at catastrophe events. They display strikingly rich biochemistry and dynamics, regulated by a stabilizing cap with distinct…
The study of intelligent systems explains behaviour in terms of economic rationality. This results in an optimization principle involving a function or utility, which states that the system will evolve until the configuration of maximum…
For most of human history, we have not thought systematically about how and why we incorporate aspects of the natural world into our designs. The lack of a systematic approach has resulted in inconsistencies in motivations and methods that…
The focus of a survival study is partly on the distribution of survival times, and partly on the health or quality of life of patients while they live. Health varies over time, and survival is the most basic aspect of health, so the two…
Fiberboids are active filaments trapped at the interface of two phases, able of harnessing energy (and matter) fluxes across the interface in order to produce a rolling-like self-propulsion. We discuss several table-top examples and develop…