Related papers: Ecosystems as adaptive living circuits
The evolutionary mechanisms of cooperative behavior represent a fundamental topic in complex systems and evolutionary dynamics. Real-world collective interactions, particularly in multi-agent systems, are often characterized by…
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems to evolve…
Ecological resilience refers to the ability of a system to retain its state when subject to state variables perturbations or parameter changes. While understanding and quantifying resilience is crucial to anticipate the possible regime…
What determines whether an organism or collective will survive under particular conditions? This question is asked across the life sciences when determining adaptive fit, developing efficacious treatments for diseases, and assessing the…
Recent developments of eco-evolutionary models have shown that evolving feedbacks between behavioral strategies and the environment of game interactions, leading to changes in the underlying payoff matrix, can impact the underlying…
Minimising the energy consumption associated with periodic motion is a priority common to a wide range of technologies and organisms - among them, many species of flying insect, for which flapping-wing flight is a life-essential mode of…
Systems of "living" polymers are ubiquitous in industry and are traditionally realised using surfactants. Here I review the state-of-the-art of living polymers and discuss non-equilibrium extensions that may be realised with advanced…
Ecosystems are commonly organized into trophic levels -- organisms that occupy the same level in a food chain (e.g., plants, herbivores, carnivores). A fundamental question in theoretical ecology is how the interplay between trophic…
Order can spontaneously emerge from seemingly noisy interactions between biological agents, like a flock of birds changing their direction of flight in unison, without a leader or an external cue. We are interested in the generic conditions…
We analyze the probability distribution for entropy production rates of trajectories evolving on a class of out-of-equilibrium kinetic networks. These networks can serve as simple models for driven dynamical systems, which are of particular…
Associative learning is one of the key mechanisms displayed by living organisms in order to adapt to their changing environments. It was early recognized to be a general trait of complex multicellular organisms but also found in "simpler"…
As a result of a hundred million years of evolution, living animals have adapted extremely well to their ecological niche. Such adaptation implies species-specific interactions with their immediate environment by processing sensory cues and…
Electric circuits manipulate electric charge and magnetic flux via a small set of discrete components to implement useful functionality over continuous time-varying signals represented by currents and voltages. Much of the same…
The research concerns the dynamics of complex autonomous Kauffman networks. The article defines and shows using simulation experiments half-chaotic networks, which exhibit features much more similar to typically modeled systems like a…
Due to the conventional distinction between ecological (rapid) and evolutionary (slow)timescales, ecological and population models to date have typically ignored the effects of evolution. Yet the potential for rapid evolutionary change has…
We provide a non-equilibrium thermodynamic description of the life-cycle of a droplet based, chemically feasible, system of protocells. By coupling the protocells metabolic kinetics with its thermodynamics, we demonstrate how the system can…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…
Symmetries represent a fundamental constraint for physical systems and relevant new phenomena often emerge as a consequence of their breaking. An important example is provided by space- and time-translational invariance in statistical…
Organisms shape their own environment, which in turn affects their survival. This feedback becomes especially important for communities containing a large number of species; however, few existing approaches allow studying this regime,…