Self-Organization in Biological Systems PDF Download

Author: Scott Camazine
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691212929
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The synchronized flashing of fireflies at night. The spiraling patterns of an aggregating slime mold. The anastomosing network of army-ant trails. The coordinated movements of a school of fish. Researchers are finding in such patterns--phenomena that have fascinated naturalists for centuries--a fertile new approach to understanding biological systems: the study of self-organization. This book, a primer on self-organization in biological systems for students and other enthusiasts, introduces readers to the basic concepts and tools for studying self-organization and then examines numerous examples of self-organization in the natural world. Self-organization refers to diverse pattern formation processes in the physical and biological world, from sand grains assembling into rippled dunes to cells combining to create highly structured tissues to individual insects working to create sophisticated societies. What these diverse systems hold in common is the proximate means by which they acquire order and structure. In self-organizing systems, pattern at the global level emerges solely from interactions among lower-level components. Remarkably, even very complex structures result from the iteration of surprisingly simple behaviors performed by individuals relying on only local information. This striking conclusion suggests important lines of inquiry: To what degree is environmental rather than individual complexity responsible for group complexity? To what extent have widely differing organisms adopted similar, convergent strategies of pattern formation? How, specifically, has natural selection determined the rules governing interactions within biological systems? Broad in scope, thorough yet accessible, this book is a self-contained introduction to self-organization and complexity in biology--a field of study at the forefront of life sciences research.

Author: Paul Krugman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1557866988
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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The Self-Organizing Economy In the last few years the concept of self-organizing systems—complex systems in which randomness and chaos seem spontaneously to evolve into unexpected order—has linked together researchers in many fields, from artificial intelligence to chemistry, from evolution to geology. Now leading economist Paul Krugman shows how principles that explain the growth of hurricanes and embryos can also explain the formation of cities and business cycles; how the same principles of “order from random growth” can explain the strangely simple rules that describe the sizes of earthquakes, meteorites, and metropolitan areas. Weaving together strands from many disciplines, from location theory to biology, The Self-Organizing Economy offers a surprising new view of how the economy structures itself in space and time.

Author: F.Eugene Yates
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461308836
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 658

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Book Description
Technological systems become organized by commands from outside, as when human intentions lead to the building of structures or machines. But many nat ural systems become structured by their own internal processes: these are the self organizing systems, and the emergence of order within them is a complex phe nomenon that intrigues scientists from all disciplines. Unfortunately, complexity is ill-defined. Global explanatory constructs, such as cybernetics or general sys tems theory, which were intended to cope with complexity, produced instead a grandiosity that has now, mercifully, run its course and died. Most of us have become wary of proposals for an "integrated, systems approach" to complex matters; yet we must come to grips with complexity some how. Now is a good time to reexamine complex systems to determine whether or not various scientific specialties can discover common principles or properties in them. If they do, then a fresh, multidisciplinary attack on the difficulties would be a valid scientific task. Believing that complexity is a proper scientific issue, and that self-organizing systems are the foremost example, R. Tomovic, Z. Damjanovic, and I arranged a conference (August 26-September 1, 1979) in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, to address self-organizing systems. We invited 30 participants from seven countries. Included were biologists, geologists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, bio physicists, and control engineers. Participants were asked not to bring manu scripts, but, rather, to present positions on an assigned topic. Any writing would be done after the conference, when the writers could benefit from their experi ences there.

Author: Juval Portugali
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3662040999
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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This book integrates the theories of complex self-organizing systems with the rich body of discourse and literature developed in what might be called ‘social theory of cities and urbanism’. It uses techniques from dynamical complexity and synergetics to successfully tackle open social science questions.

Author: Stuart Kauffman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019984030X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
A major scientific revolution has begun, a new paradigm that rivals Darwin's theory in importance. At its heart is the discovery of the order that lies deep within the most complex of systems, from the origin of life, to the workings of giant corporations, to the rise and fall of great civilizations. And more than anyone else, this revolution is the work of one man, Stuart Kauffman, a MacArthur Fellow and visionary pioneer of the new science of complexity. Now, in At Home in the Universe, Kauffman brilliantly weaves together the excitement of intellectual discovery and a fertile mix of insights to give the general reader a fascinating look at this new science--and at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos. We all know of instances of spontaneous order in nature--an oil droplet in water forms a sphere, snowflakes have a six-fold symmetry. What we are only now discovering, Kauffman says, is that the range of spontaneous order is enormously greater than we had supposed. Indeed, self-organization is a great undiscovered principle of nature. But how does this spontaneous order arise? Kauffman contends that complexity itself triggers self-organization, or what he calls "order for free," that if enough different molecules pass a certain threshold of complexity, they begin to self-organize into a new entity--a living cell. Kauffman uses the analogy of a thousand buttons on a rug--join two buttons randomly with thread, then another two, and so on. At first, you have isolated pairs; later, small clusters; but suddenly at around the 500th repetition, a remarkable transformation occurs--much like the phase transition when water abruptly turns to ice--and the buttons link up in one giant network. Likewise, life may have originated when the mix of different molecules in the primordial soup passed a certain level of complexity and self-organized into living entities (if so, then life is not a highly improbable chance event, but almost inevitable). Kauffman uses the basic insight of "order for free" to illuminate a staggering range of phenomena. We see how a single-celled embryo can grow to a highly complex organism with over two hundred different cell types. We learn how the science of complexity extends Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection: that self-organization, selection, and chance are the engines of the biosphere. And we gain insights into biotechnology, the stunning magic of the new frontier of genetic engineering--generating trillions of novel molecules to find new drugs, vaccines, enzymes, biosensors, and more. Indeed, Kauffman shows that ecosystems, economic systems, and even cultural systems may all evolve according to similar general laws, that tissues and terra cotta evolve in similar ways. And finally, there is a profoundly spiritual element to Kauffman's thought. If, as he argues, life were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbable accident, but as an expected fulfillment of the natural order, then we truly are at home in the universe. Kauffman's earlier volume, The Origins of Order, written for specialists, received lavish praise. Stephen Jay Gould called it "a landmark and a classic." And Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson wrote that "there are few people in this world who ever ask the right questions of science, and they are the ones who affect its future most profoundly. Stuart Kauffman is one of these." In At Home in the Universe, this visionary thinker takes you along as he explores new insights into the nature of life.

Author: J. A. Scott Kelso
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262611312
Category : Behavior
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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foreword by Hermann Haken For the past twenty years Scott Kelso's research has focused on extending the physical concepts of self- organization and the mathematical tools of nonlinear dynamics to understand how human beings (and human brains) perceive, intend, learn, control, and coordinate complex behaviors. In this book Kelso proposes a new, general framework within which to connect brain, mind, and behavior.Kelso's prescription for mental life breaks dramatically with the classical computational approach that is still the operative framework for many newer psychological and neurophysiological studies. His core thesis is that the creation and evolution of patterned behavior at all levels--from neurons to mind--is governed by the generic processes of self-organization. Both human brain and behavior are shown to exhibit features of pattern-forming dynamical systems, including multistability, abrupt phase transitions, crises, and intermittency. Dynamic Patterns brings together different aspects of this approach to the study of human behavior, using simple experimental examples and illustrations to convey essential concepts, strategies, and methods, with a minimum of mathematics. Kelso begins with a general account of dynamic pattern formation. He then takes up behavior, focusing initially on identifying pattern-forming instabilities in human sensorimotor coordination. Moving back and forth between theory and experiment, he establishes the notion that the same pattern-forming mechanisms apply regardless of the component parts involved (parts of the body, parts of the nervous system, parts of society) and the medium through which the parts are coupled. Finally, employing the latest techniques to observe spatiotemporal patterns of brain activity, Kelso shows that the human brain is fundamentally a pattern forming dynamical system, poised on the brink of instability. Self-organization thus underlies the cooperative action of neurons that produces human behavior in all its forms.

Author: Mikhail Prokopenko
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642537340
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
Is it possible to guide the process of self-organisation towards specific patterns and outcomes? Wouldn’t this be self-contradictory? After all, a self-organising process assumes a transition into a more organised form, or towards a more structured functionality, in the absence of centralised control. Then how can we place the guiding elements so that they do not override rich choices potentially discoverable by an uncontrolled process? This book presents different approaches to resolving this paradox. In doing so, the presented studies address a broad range of phenomena, ranging from autopoietic systems to morphological computation, and from small-world networks to information cascades in swarms. A large variety of methods is employed, from spontaneous symmetry breaking to information dynamics to evolutionary algorithms, creating a rich spectrum reflecting this emerging field. Demonstrating several foundational theories and frameworks, as well as innovative practical implementations, Guided Self-Organisation: Inception, will be an invaluable tool for advanced students and researchers in a multiplicity of fields across computer science, physics and biology, including information theory, robotics, dynamical systems, graph theory, artificial life, multi-agent systems, theory of computation and machine learning.

Author: Hermann Haken
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3540330232
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The widespread interest this book has found among professors, scientists and stu dents working in a variety of fields has made a new edition necessary. I have used this opportunity to add three new chapters on recent developments. One of the most fascinating fields of modern science is cognitive science which has become a meet ing place of many disciplines ranging from mathematics over physics and computer science to psychology. Here, one of the important links between these fields is the concept of information which, however, appears in various disguises, be it as Shan non information or as semantic information (or as something still different). So far, meaning seemed to be exorcised from Shannon information, whereas meaning plays a central role in semantic (or as it is sometimes called "pragmatic") information. In the new chapter 13 it will be shown, however, that there is an important interplay between Shannon and semantic information and that, in particular, the latter plays a decisive role in the fixation of Shannon information and, in cognitive processes, al lows a drastic reduction of that information. A second, equally fascinating and rapidly developing field for mathematicians, computer scientists and physicists is quantum information and quantum computa tion. The inclusion of these topics is a must for any modern treatise dealing with in formation. It becomes more and more evident that the abstract concept of informa tion is inseparably tied up with its realizations in the physical world.

Author: Marek Orlik
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642276733
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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This is the first of two volumes offering the very first comprehensive treatise of self-organization and non-linear dynamics in electrochemical systems. The second volume covers spatiotemporal patterns and the control of chaos. The content of both volumes is organized so that each description of a particular electrochemical system is preceded by an introduction to basic concepts of nonlinear dynamics, in order to help the reader unfamiliar with this discipline to understand at least fundamental concepts and the methods of stability analysis. The presentation of the systems is not limited to laboratory models but stretches out to real-life objects and processes, including systems of biological importance, such as neurons in living matter. Marek Orlik presents a comprehensive and consistent survey of the field.

Author: Gregoire Nicolis
Publisher: Wiley-VCH
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Membranes, Dissipative Structures, and Evolution Edited by G. Nicolis & R. Lefever Focuses on the problem of the emergence/maintenance of biological order at successively higher levels of complexity. Covers the spatiotemporal organization of simple biochemical networks; the formation of pluricellular or macromolecular assemblies; the evolution of these structures; and the functions of specific biological structures. Volume 29 in Advances in Chemical Physics Series, I. Prigogine & Stuart A. Rice, Editors. 1975 Theory and Applications of Molecular Paramagnetism Edited by E. A. Boudreaux & L. N. Mulay Comprehensively treats the basic theory of paramagnetic phenomena from both the classical and mechanical vantages. It examines the magnetic behavior of Lanthanide and Actinide elements as well as traditional transition metals. For each class of compounds, appropriate details of descriptive and mathematical theory are given before their applications. 1976 Theory and Aapplications of Molecular Diamagnetism Edited by L. N. Mulay & E. A. Boudreaux An invaluable reference for solving chemical problems in magnetics, magnetochemistry, and related areas where magnetic data are important, such as solid-state physics and optical spectroscopy. 1976