Related papers: Evolution of Biological Complexity
A primary motivation for our research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve complex,…
Why life is complex and --most importantly-- what is the origin of the over abundance of complexity in nature? This is a fundamental scientific question which, paraphrasing the late Per Bak, "is screaming to be answered but seldom is even…
In this paper we examine the concept of complexity as it applies to generative art and design. Complexity has many different, discipline specific definitions, such as complexity in physical systems (entropy), algorithmic measures of…
The genome is software because it a set of verbal instructions for a programmable computer, the ribosome. The theory of evolution now reads: evolution is the software developer responsible for the existence of the genome. We claim that this…
Identifying drivers of complex traits from the noisy signals of genetic variation obtained from high throughput genome sequencing technologies is a central challenge faced by human geneticists today. We hypothesize that the variants…
Textual analysis of typical microbial genomes reveals that they have the statistical characteristics of a DNA sequence of a much shorter length. This peculiar property supports an evolutionary model in which a genome evolves by random…
In this paper, we wish to investigate the dynamics of information transfer in evolutionary dynamics. We use information theoretic tools to track how much information an evolving population has obtained and managed to retain about different…
Living systems operate far from equilibrium, yet few general frameworks provide global bounds on biological transients. In high-dimensional biological networks like ecosystems, long transients arise from the separate timescales of…
Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs,…
Researchers have proposed that the distinction between so-called "simple" and "complex" societies can be expressed by an increase in the number of levels at which functional organization, interaction, and thus selection, operate. In spite…
From the perfect radial symmetries of radiolarian mineral skeletons to the broken symmetry of homochirality, the logic of Nature's regularities has fascinated scientists for centuries. Some of Nature's symmetries are clearly visible in…
There is an intrinsic relationship between the molecular evolution in primordial period and the properties of genomes and proteomes of contemporary species. The genomic data may help us understand the driving force of evolution of life at…
A full accounting of biological robustness remains elusive; both in terms of the mechanisms by which robustness is achieved and the forces that have caused robustness to grow over evolutionary time. Although its importance to topics such as…
This study presents the approach to analyzing the evolution of an arbitrary complex system whose behavior is characterized by a set of different time-dependent factors. The key requirement for these factors is only that they must contain an…
A tumor can be thought of as an ecosystem, which critically means that we cannot just consider it as a collection of mutated cells but more as a complex system of many interacting cellular and microenvironmental elements. At its simplest, a…
Evolution is the process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments. This is expressed via the concept of fitness, defined as relative reproductive success. However, it has been pointed out that this…
The role of the selection pressure and mutation amplitude on the behavior of a single-species population evolving on a two-dimensional lattice, in a periodically changing environment, is studied both analytically and numerically. The…
At odds with a traditional view of molecular evolution that seeks a descent-with-modification relationship between functional sequences, new functions can emerge {\it de novo} with relative ease. At early times of molecular evolution,…
With a view to connecting random mutation on the molecular level to punctuated equilibrium behavior on the phenotype level, we propose a new model for biological evolution, which incorporates random mutation and natural selection. In this…
In this paper we propose an approach for measuring growth of complexity of emerging patterns in complex systems such as cellular automata. We discuss several ways how a metric for measuring the complexity growth can be defined. This…