Related papers: Ecosystems as adaptive living circuits
Habituation - a phenomenon in which a dynamical system exhibits a diminishing response to repeated stimulations that eventually recovers when the stimulus is withheld - is universally observed in living systems from animals to unicellular…
We introduce a model of biological evolution where species evolve in response to biotic interactions and a fluctuating environmental stress. The species may either become extinct or mutate to acquire a new fitness value when the effective…
This paper establishes a quantitative and structural framework for civilizational continuity under rapid, non-linear ecological transitions. Utilizing empirical data on Earth's Energy Imbalance (EEI), currently measured at 1.36 W/m^2, we…
Equilibrium is a rather ideal situation, the exception rather than the rule in Nature. Whenever the external or internal parameters of a physical system are varied its subsequent relaxation to equilibrium may be either impossible or take…
Adaptation to environmental change is a common property of biological systems. Cells initially respond to external changes in the environment, but after some time, they regain their original state. By considering an element consisting of…
Topological invariants have proved useful for analyzing emergent function as they characterize a property of the entire system, and are insensitive to local details, disorder, and noise. They support boundary states, which reduce the system…
The present article introduces a reference framework for discussing resilience of computational systems. Rather than a property that may or may not be exhibited by a system, resilience is interpreted here as the emerging result of a dynamic…
Ecological systems comprise an astonishing diversity of species that cooperate or compete with each other forming complex mutual dependencies. The minimum requirements to maintain a large species diversity on long time scales are in general…
Many biological regulatory systems process signals out of steady state and respond with a physiological delay. A simple model of regulation which respects these features shows how the ability of a delayed output to transmit information is…
Understanding how systems respond to external perturbations is a fundamental challenge in physics, particularly for non-equilibrium and non-stationary processes. The fluctuation-dissipation theorem provides a complete framework for…
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…
Large and complex molecules are building blocks for life. We compute probabilities for their formation from an average non-equilibrium model. As the distance from thermodynamic equilibrium is increased in this model, so too are the chances…
The consensus that complexity begets stability in ecosystems was challenged in the seventies, a result recently extended to ecologically-inspired networks. The approaches assume the existence of a feasible equilibrium, i.e. with positive…
Feedback loops are major components of biochemical systems. Many systems show multiple such (positive or negative) feedback loops. Nevertheless, very few quantitative analyses address the question how such multiple feedback loops evolved.…
Environmental changes play a critical role in determining the evolution of social dilemmas in many natural or social systems. Generally, the environmental changes include two prominent aspects: the global time-dependent fluctuations and the…
Standard approaches to controlling dynamical systems involve biologically implausible steps such as backpropagation of errors or intermediate model-based system representations. Recent advances in machine learning have shown that…
A natural phenomenon occurring in a living system is an outcome of the dynamics of the specific biological network underlying the phenomenon. The collective dynamics have both deterministic and stochastic components. The stochastic nature…
Large responses of ecosystems to small changes in the conditions--regime shifts--are of great interest and importance. In spatially extended ecosystems, these shifts may be local or global. Using empirical data and mathematical modeling, we…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
With the completion of human genome mapping, the focus of scientists seeking to explain the biological complexity of living systems is shifting from analyzing the individual components (such as a particular gene or biochemical reaction) to…