Related papers: On the Statistical Law of Life
We study the statistical underpinnings of life. We question some common assumptions about the thermodynamics of life and illustrate how, contrary to widespread belief, even in a closed system entropy growth can accompany an increase in…
A general model for the ontogenetic growth of living organisms has been recently proposed. Here we investigate the extension of this model to the growth of solid malignant tumors. A variety of in vitro and in vivo data are analyzed and…
Most physical and other natural systems are complex entities composed of a large number of interacting individual elements. It is a surprising fact that they often obey the so-called scaling laws relating an observable quantity with a…
Starting from a master equation, we derive the evolution equation for the size distribution of elements in an evolving system, where each element can grow, divide into two, and produce new elements. We then probe general solutions of the…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event…
Scaling laws illuminate Nature's fundamental biological principles and guide bioinspired materials and structural designs. In simple cases they are based on the fundamental principle that all laws of nature remain unchanged (i.e.,…
This paper investigates the role of size in biological organisms. More specifically, how the energy demand, expressed by the metabolic rate, changes according to the mass of an organism. Empirical evidence suggests a power-law relation…
We present significantly advanced studies of the previously introduced physical growth mechanism and unite it with biochemical growth factors. Obtained results allowed formulating the general growth law which governs growth and evolutional…
We have previously reported that a 'universal' growth law with fixed scaling exponent p, as proposed by West and collaborators for all living organisms, appears to be able to describe also the growth of tumors in vivo. Here, we investigate…
Interpretation of empirical results based on a taxa's lifetime distribution shows apparently conflicting results. Species' lifetime is reported to be exponentially distributed, whereas higher order taxa, such as families or genera, follow a…
The fracture strength distribution of materials is often described in terms of the Weibull law which can be derived by using extreme value statistics if elastic interactions are ignored. Here, we consider explicitly the interplay between…
In this review, we discuss the applications of the theory of birth-and-death processes to problems in biology, primarily, those of evolutionary genomics. The mathematical principles of the theory of these processes are briefly described.…
We have previously reported that a universal growth law, as proposed by West and collaborators for all living organisms, appears to be able to describe also the growth of tumors in vivo. In contrast to the assumption of a fixed power…
Two basic features of assemblages of unicellular plankton: (1) their high biodiversity and (2) the power-law structure of their abundance, can be explained by an allometric scaling of cell growth and mortality with respect to cell size. To…
Multiple species in the ecosystem are believed to compete cyclically for survival and thus maintain balance in nature. Stochasticity has also an inevitable role in this dynamics. Considering these attributes of nature, the stochastic…
Nearly all cell models explicitly or implicitly deal with the biophysical constraints that must be respected for life to persist. Despite this, there is almost no systematicity in how these constraints are implemented, and we lack a…
We examine a lattice model of tumor growth where survival of tumor cells depends on the supplied nutrients. When such a supply is random, the extinction of tumors belongs to the directed percolation universality class. However, when the…
The classical "game of life" (GOL) due to Conway is a famous mathematical game constructed as a two-dimensional cellular automaton in which each cell is either alive or dead. A set of evolutionary rules determines whether a cell dies,…
Branching processes pervade many models in statistical physics. We investigate the survival probability of a Galton-Watson branching process after a finite number of generations. We reveal the finite-size scaling law of the survival…
The molecular biology revolution of the last seventy five years has transformed our view of living systems. Scientific explanations of biological phenomena are now synonymous with the identification of the genes, proteins, and signaling…