Related papers: A Formal Physical Framework for the Origin of Life…
When a large number of similar entities interact among each other and with their environment at a low scale, unexpected outcomes at higher spatio-temporal scales might spontaneously arise. This nontrivial phenomenon, known as emergence,…
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…
The most important thermodynamic work performed by life today is the dissipation of the solar photon flux into heat through organic pigments in water. From this thermodynamic perspective, biological evolution is thus just the dispersal of…
The aim of this essay is to analyze the role of quantum mechanics as an inherent characteristic of life. During the last ten years the problem of the origin of life has become an innovative research subject approached by many authors. The…
Living systems exhibit a range of fundamental characteristics: they are active, self-referential, self-modifying systems. This paper explores how these characteristics create challenges for conventional scientific approaches and why they…
We propose a generic model of eco-systems, with a {\it hierarchical} food web structure. In our computer simulations we let the eco-system evolve continuously for so long that that we can monitor extinctions as well as speciations over…
Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…
In this work, a conceptual bio-inspired parallel and distributed learning framework for the emergence of general intelligence is proposed, where agents evolve through environmental rewards and learn throughout their lifetime without…
The early start to life naively suggests that abiogenesis is a rapid process on Earth-like planets. However, if evolution typically takes ~4Gyr to produce intelligent life-forms like us, then the limited lifespan of Earth's biosphere…
This letter seeks to illuminate the profound connection between complexity, self-organization, emergent behaviour, pattern formation, and entropy concepts that are foundational to understanding our universe. By examining these ideas through…
Life emerged on the Earth within the first quintile of its habitable window, but a technological civilization did not blossom until its last. Efforts to infer the rate of abiogenesis, based on its early emergence, are frustrated by the…
By generalizing a class of models recently introduced to account for protracted transients in biological systems, we identify a novel mechanism for hyperuniformity. In this model, competition of particles over a shared resource guides the…
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 study the probabilities of evolution based on random mutations and natural selection. We conclude that evolution to multicellular eukaryots, or even prokaryots, is unlikely to be the result of only random mutations. Complex organisms…
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…
Redox biology underpins signalling, metabolism, immunity, and adaptation, yet lacks a unifying theoretical framework capable of formalising structure, function, and dynamics. Current interpretations rely on descriptive catalogues of…
A universal framework is proposed, where all laws are regularities of relations between things or agents. Parts of the world at one or all times are modeled as networks called SYSTEMS with a minimum of axiomatic properties. A notion of…
Many examples of cooperation exist in biology. In chemical systems however, which can sometimes be quite complex, we do not appear to observe intricate cooperative interactions. A key question for the origin of life, is then how can…
Plant morphogenesis relies on dynamic growth deformations at the cell and tissue scales driven by osmotic fluxes. A mechanistic understanding of this phenomenon demands a physical framework that integrates cell imbibition, tissue mechanics,…
The driving force behind the origin and evolution of life has been the thermodynamic imperative of increasing the entropy production of the biosphere through increasing the global solar photon dissipation rate. In the upper atmosphere of…