ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Physical foundations of biological complexity.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 49 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
49 citing papers in PubMed.
- Geometric Learning Dynamics.Biological cybernetics · 2026Article
- The selfish ribosome.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Organizational Principles of Biological Systems.Biology · 2026Review
- The selfish ribosome.ArXiv · 2026Article
- On the nature of the earliest known lifeforms.eLife · 2026Article
- Article
- The key role of cheaters in the persistence of cooperation.BMC biology · 2026Article
- Physical Frameworks and Theories on How Autonomous Biological Oscillators Synchronize.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2026Review
- Self-organized angleworm-like and centipede-like patterns in ac-driven electroconvection of nematic liquid crystals.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Bifurcations and phase transitions in the origins of life.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Frustration in physiology and molecular medicine.Molecular aspects of medicine · 2025Review
- Dietary Breadth Predicts Toxin Expression Complexity in the Venoms of North American Gartersnakes.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- The dynamics of prion spreading is governed by the interplay between the non-linearities of tissue response and replication kinetics.iScience · 2024Article
- The key role of cheaters in the persistence of cooperation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Evolution and development of complex floral displays.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2024Review
- Long range segmentation of prokaryotic genomes by gene age and functionality.Nucleic acids research · 2024Article
- Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems.Interface focus · 2024Review
- Complexity and entropy of natural patterns.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Spatiotemporal organization of ant foraging from a complex systems perspective.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Measuring Molecular Complexity.ACS central science · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Biological systems reach hierarchical complexity that has no counterpart outside the realm of biology. Undoubtedly, biological entities obey the fundamental physical laws. Can today's physics provide an explanatory framework for understanding the evolution of biological complexity? We argue that the physical foundation for understanding the origin and evolution of complexity can be gleaned at the interface between the theory of frustrated states resulting in pattern formation in glass-like media and the theory of self-organized criticality (SOC). On the one hand, SOC has been shown to emerge in spin-glass systems of high dimensionality. On the other hand, SOC is often viewed as the most appropriate physical description of evolutionary transitions in biology. We unify these two faces of SOC by showing that emergence of complex features in biological evolution typically, if not always, is triggered by frustration that is caused by competing interactions at different organizational levels. Such competing interactions lead to SOC, which represents the optimal conditions for the emergence of complexity. Competing interactions and frustrated states permeate biology at all organizational levels and are tightly linked to the ubiquitous competition for limiting resources. This perspective extends from the comparatively simple phenomena occurring in glasses to large-scale events of biological evolution, such as major evolutionary transitions. Frustration caused by competing interactions in multidimensional systems could be the general driving force behind the emergence of complexity, within and beyond the domain of biology.
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.