Related papers: Decoding the Architecture of Living Systems
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…
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…
Why are living systems complex? Why does the biosphere contain living beings with complexity features beyond those of the simplest replicators? What kind of evolutionary pressures result in more complex life forms? These are key questions…
Evolutionary game theory has been successfully used to investigate the dynamics of systems, in which many entities have competitive interactions. From a physics point of view, it is interesting to study conditions under which a coordination…
Eco-evolutionary dynamics, or eco-evolution for short, are thought to involve rapid demography (ecology) and equally rapid phenotypic changes (evolution) leading to novel, emergent system behaviours. This focus on contemporary dynamics is…
Microbial ecosystems exhibit a surprising amount of functionally relevant diversity at all levels of taxonomic resolution, presenting a significant challenge for most modeling frameworks. A long-standing hope of theoretical ecology is that…
We analyse the role played by system-environment correlations in the emergence of non-Markovian dynamics. By working within the framework developed in Breuer et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 210401 (2009), we unveil a fundamental connection…
Biological organisms adapt to changes by processing informations from different sources, most notably from their ancestors and from their environment. We review an approach to quantify these informations by analyzing mathematical models of…
The concept of hierarchy in complex systems is tightly linked to co-evolutionary processes. We propose here to explore it in the case of the co-evolution between transportation networks and territories. More precisely, we extend a…
Cooperation plays a fundamental role in societal and biological domains, and the population structure profoundly shapes the dynamics of evolution. Practically, individuals behave either altruistically or egoistically in multiple groups,…
We argue for a convergence of crystallography, materials science and biology, that will come about through asking materials questions about biology and biological questions about materials, illuminated by considerations of information. The…
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…
A variety of physical, social and biological systems generate complex fluctuations with correlations across multiple time scales. In physiologic systems, these long-range correlations are altered with disease and aging. Such correlated…
A biological circuit is a neural or biochemical cascade, taking inputs and producing outputs. How have biological circuits learned to solve environmental challenges over the history of life? The answer certainly follows Dobzhansky's famous…
Recently, computational modelling became a very important research tool that enables us to study problems that for decades evaded scientific analysis. Evolutionary systems are certainly examples of such problems: they are composed of many…
Several approaches to cognition and intelligence research rely on statistics-based models testing, namely factor analysis. In the present work we exploit the emerging dynamical systems perspective putting the focus on the role of the…
Social institutions are systems of shared norms and rules that regulate people's behaviors, often emerging without external enforcement. They provide criteria to distinguish cooperation from defection and establish rules to sustain…
We consider a heteroclinic network in the framework of winnerless competition of species. It consists of two levels of heteroclinic cycles. On the lower level, the heteroclinic cycle connects three saddles, each representing the survival of…
There has been a long debate on how new levels of organization have evolved. It might seem unlikely, as cooperation must prevail over competition. One well-studied example is the emergence of autocatalytic sets, which seem to be a…
This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…