Related papers: Life as Non-Normal Chemical Accelerator
Nature's many complex systems--physical, biological, and cultural--are islands of low-entropy order within increasingly disordered seas of surrounding, high-entropy chaos. Energy is a principal facilitator of the rising complexity of all…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
A large number of complex systems, naturally emerging in various domains, are well described by directed networks, resulting in numerous interesting features that are absent from their undirected counterparts. Among these properties is a…
Quantifying entropy production in various active matter phases will open new avenues for probing self-organization principles in these far-from-equilibrium systems. It has been hypothesized that the dissipation of free energy by active…
The improbability of a spontaneously generated self-assembling molecule has suggested that life began with a set of simpler, collectively replicating elements, such as an enclosed autocatalytic set of polymers (or protocell). Since…
Recent computational experiments have demonstrated the spontaneous emergence of self-replicating programs across universal automata, artificial chemistries, and self-modifying code systems. Remarkably, these results arise without explicit…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
The living organism is considered as an open system, whereas Prigogine's approach to the thermodynamics of such systems is used. The approach allows one to formulate the law of individual growth and development (ontogenesis) of the living…
Collections of self-propelled particles that move persistently by continuously consuming free energy are a paradigmatic example of active matter. In these systems, unlike Brownian "hot colloids", the breakdown of detailed balance yields a…
Steepest-Entropy-Ascent Quantum Thermodynamics (SEAQT) provides a general framework for the description of non-equilibrium phenomena at any level, particularly the atomistic one. This theory and its dynamical postulate are used here to…
We study a family of networks of autocatalytic reactions, which we call hyperchains, that are a generalization of hypercycles. Hyperchains, and the associated dynamical system called replicator equations, are a possible mechanism for…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
We distinguish a mechanical representation of the world in terms of point masses with positions and momenta and the chemical representation of the world in terms of populations of different individuals, each with intrinsic stochasticity,…
Evolution is often understood through genetic mutations driving changes in an organism's fitness, but there is potential to extend this understanding beyond the genetic code. We propose that natural products - complex molecules central to…
This article presents a naturalist approach to cognition understood as a network of info-computational, autopoietic processes in living systems. It provides a conceptual framework for the unified view of cognition as evolved from the…
Proliferation is a defining feature of life. Through growth, division, and death, living systems consume energy and inject mass, breaking conservation laws and driving collective phenomena from biofilm formation to embryonic development.…
Network theory is rapidly changing our understanding of complex systems, but the relevance of topological features for the dynamic behavior of metabolic networks, food webs, production systems, information networks, or cascade failures of…
Self-organization is ubiquitous in nature and mind. However, machine learning and theories of cognition still barely touch the subject. The hurdle is that general patterns are difficult to define in terms of dynamical equations and…
Living systems operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Enzymatic activity can induce broken detailed balance at the molecular scale. This molecular scale breaking of detailed balance is crucial to achieve biological functions such as…
Self-assembly is the autonomous organization of components into patterns or structures: an essential ingredient of biology and a desired route to complex organization. At equilibrium, the structure is encoded through specific interactions,…