ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2025
Quantifying the configurational complexity of biological systems in multivariate 'complexity space'.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 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
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- An Increase in Animal Diversity was Facilitated by Ecologically-Driven Brain Complexity Throughout the Cambrian.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2026Review
- Can the Timing of the Origin of Life Be Inferred from Trends in the Growth of Organismal Complexity?Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Mapping life's disparity and evolutionary constraints in a geometric complexity space.Science advances · 2026Article
- Biomimetic Additive Manufacturing: Engineering Complexity Inspired by Nature's Simplicity.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Quantifying the configurational complexity of biological systems in multivariate 'complexity space'.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
An increasing number of evolutionary studies seek to quantify the morphological complexity of organisms, particularly those comprising serially homologous elements at different hierarchical levels of organization. Numerous operational frameworks have been proposed for doing this, but most focus on one or multiple conflated aspects of what is really a multidimensional concept. Here, we advocate the use of 'complexity spaces': multidimensional spaces defined by different vectors of complexity. We explore their application to biological systems composed of homologous parts and identify three axes on which those systems differ: part number, part differentiation and the regularity of that differentiation. Such complexity spaces can be constructed for systems at different hierarchical levels of biological organization. To illustrate this, we explore the complexity spaces for trilobite body plans (comprising body segments of varying number and form), and for ant colonies (comprising differentiated worker polymorphisms of varying number and form within a 'superorganism'). Many different complexity spaces are possible, but all seek to distinguish different aspects of complexity within an information-theoretic framework, and thereby to clarify patterns of complexity evolution.
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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.