相关论文: A Formal Physical Framework for the Origin of Life…
Many of life's most fascinating phenomena emerge from interactions among many elements--many amino acids determine the structure of a single protein, many genes determine the fate of a cell, many neurons are involved in shaping our thoughts…
Possibility to establish macroscopic phenomenological theory for biological systems, akin to the akin to the well-established framework of thermodynamics, is briefly reviewed. We introduce the concept of an evolutionary fluctuation-response…
If the parameters defining the physics of our universe departed from their present values, the observed rich structure and complexity would not be supported. This article considers whether similar fine-tuning of parameters applies to…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
Understanding the thermodynamics of the duplication process is a fundamental step towards a comprehensive physical theory of biological systems. However, the immense complexity of real cells obscures the fundamental tensions between energy…
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a…
Motivated by a recent article on open problems in artificial life, here I postulate three laws which form a mathematical framework to describe artificial life evolutionary dynamics. They are based on a continuous approximation of population…
The fact that certain "extraordinary" probabilistic phenomena--in particular, macroscopic violations of the second law of thermodynamics--have never been observed to occur can be accounted for by taking hard preclusion as a basic physical…
A simple model of macroevolution is proposed exhibiting both the property of punctuated equilibrium and the dynamics of potentialities for different species to evolve towards increasingly higher complexity. It is based on the phenomenon of…
Recent experimental investigations into Hydra regeneration revealed a remarkable phenomenon: the morphological transformation of a tissue fragment from the incipient spherical configuration to a tube-like structure - the hallmark of a…
The rise of multicellularity in the early evolution of life represents a major challenge for evolutionary biology. Guidance for finding answers has emerged from disparate fields, from phylogenetics to modelling and synthetic biology, but…
Structure-forming systems are ubiquitous in nature, ranging from atoms building molecules to self-assembly of colloidal amphibolic particles. The understanding of the underlying thermodynamics of such systems remains an important problem.…
It is suggested that life originated in a three-step process referred to as the jigsaw model. RNA, proteins, or similar organic molecules polymerized in a dehydrated carbon-rich environment, on surfaces in a carbon-rich environment, or in…
We review recent theoretical developments, which suggest that a set of shared principles underpin macroscopic quantum phenomena observed in high temperature super conducting materials, room temperature coherence in photosynthetic processes…
It is not currently possible to create a living organism ab initio due to the overwhelming complexity of biological systems. In fact, the origin of life mechanism, this being how biological organisms form from non-living matter, is unknown.…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…
One of the main goals of Artificial Life is to research the conditions for the emergence of life, not necessarily as it is, but as it could be. Artificial Chemistries are one of the most important tools for this purpose because they provide…
Even when concepts similar to emergence have been used since antiquity, we lack an agreed definition. However, emergence has been identified as one of the main features of complex systems. Most would agree on the statement ``life is…
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…
Fluctuation theorems are a generalization of thermodynamics on small scales and provide the tools to characterize the fluctuations of thermodynamic quantities in non-equilibrium nanoscale systems. They are particularly important for…