ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2007
Functional information and the emergence of biocomplexity.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2007. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed, 158 citations in OpenAlex.
- From rule-taking to rule-making chemistry: a minimal population-environment feedback model.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2026Article
- An information-theoretic argument for the restriction of the current biological alphabets to 4 nucleotides and 20 amino acids.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Evolvoid: a genetic algorithm for shaping optimal cellular constructs.Journal of biological engineering · 2026Article
- Protocellular energy transduction, information and fitness.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Assembly theory and its relationship with computational complexity.Npj complexity · 2025Article
- Feedback driven autonomous cycles of assembly and disassembly from minimal building blocks.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Potential Benefits and Challenges of Quantifying Pseudoreplication in Genomic Data with Entropy Statistics.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Article
- On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Planetary Scale Information Transmission in the Biosphere and Technosphere: Limits and Evolution.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Cells as the first data scientists.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Assessing, Testing and Estimating the Amount of Fine-Tuning by Means of Active Information.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Why is Complexity Science valuable for reaching the goals of the UN 2030 Agenda?Rendiconti Lincei. Scienze fisiche e naturali · 2021Article
- Probing complexity: thermodynamics and computational mechanics approaches to origins studies.Interface focus · 2019Article
- Deciphering Biosignatures in Planetary Contexts.Astrobiology · 2019Article
- Adaptive Properties of the Genetically Encoded Amino Acid Alphabet Are Inherited from Its Subsets.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Inferring the shape of global epistasis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Article
- From Molecules to Life: Quantifying the Complexity of Chemical and Biological Systems in the Universe.Journal of molecular evolution · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Complex emergent systems of many interacting components, including complex biological systems, have the potential to perform quantifiable functions. Accordingly, we define "functional information," I(E(x)), as a measure of system complexity. For a given system and function, x (e.g., a folded RNA sequence that binds to GTP), and degree of function, E(x) (e.g., the RNA-GTP binding energy), I(E(x)) = -log(2)[F(E(x))], where F(E(x)) is the fraction of all possible configurations of the system that possess a degree of function > or = E(x). Functional information, which we illustrate with letter sequences, artificial life, and biopolymers, thus represents the probability that an arbitrary configuration of a system will achieve a specific function to a specified degree. In each case we observe evidence for several distinct solutions with different maximum degrees of function, features that lead to steps in plots of information versus degree of function.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.