ReviewInterface focus2024
Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems.
Review in Interface focus, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 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
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Balance Between Order and Disorder: Quantum-Epigenetic Pathways for the Emergence and Continuous Evolution of Life.Acta biotheoretica · 2026Review
- Cell division sets a universal flow geometry in cell layers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Energetic constraints shape the diversity of feasible ecological networks.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Matters of life and death in computational cell biology.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2026Review
- Review
- A smartphone analogy to explore the origin of animals.The EMBO journal · 2026Review
- Mapping life's disparity and evolutionary constraints in a geometric complexity space.Science advances · 2026Article
- Article
- Discovering sensorimotor agency in cellular automata using diversity search.Science advances · 2025Article
- How hard is it to encapsulate life? The general constraints on encapsulation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Origins of life: the possible and the actual.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Bifurcations and phase transitions in the origins of life.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Assembly theory and its relationship with computational complexity.Npj complexity · 2025Article
- Open problems in synthetic multicellularity.NPJ systems biology and applications · 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
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It has been argued that the historical nature of evolution makes it a highly path-dependent process. Under this view, the outcome of evolutionary dynamics could have resulted in organisms with different forms and functions. At the same time, there is ample evidence that convergence and constraints strongly limit the domain of the potential design principles that evolution can achieve. Are these limitations relevant in shaping the fabric of the possible? Here, we argue that fundamental constraints are associated with the logic of living matter. We illustrate this idea by considering the thermodynamic properties of living systems, the linear nature of molecular information, the cellular nature of the building blocks of life, multicellularity and development, the threshold nature of computations in cognitive systems and the discrete nature of the architecture of ecosystems. In all these examples, we present available evidence and suggest potential avenues towards a well-defined theoretical formulation.
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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.