Download or read book Physics of Self Organization and Evolution written by Werner Ebeling and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-19 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thoroughly updated version of the German authoritative work on self-organization has been completely rewritten by internationally renowned experts and experienced book authors to also include a review of more recent literature. It retains the original enthusiasm and fascination surrounding thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium, synergetics, and the origin of life, representing an easily readable book and tutorial on this exciting field. The book is unique in covering in detail the experimental and theoretical fundamentals of self-organizing systems as well as such selected features as random processes, structural networks and multistable systems, while focusing on the physical and theoretical modeling of natural selection and evolution processes. The authors take examples from physics, chemistry, biology and social systems, and include results hitherto unpublished in English. The result is a one-stop resource relevant for students and scientists in physics or related interdisciplinary fields, including mathematical physics, biophysics, information science and nanotechnology.
Download or read book The Origins of Order written by Stuart A. Kauffman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1993-06-10 with total page 734 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stuart Kauffman here presents a brilliant new paradigm for evolutionary biology, one that extends the basic concepts of Darwinian evolution to accommodate recent findings and perspectives from the fields of biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics. The book drives to the heart of the exciting debate on the origins of life and maintenance of order in complex biological systems. It focuses on the concept of self-organization: the spontaneous emergence of order that is widely observed throughout nature Kauffman argues that self-organization plays an important role in the Darwinian process of natural selection. Yet until now no systematic effort has been made to incorporate the concept of self-organization into evolutionary theory. The construction requirements which permit complex systems to adapt are poorly understood, as is the extent to which selection itself can yield systems able to adapt more successfully. This book explores these themes. It shows how complex systems, contrary to expectations, can spontaneously exhibit stunning degrees of order, and how this order, in turn, is essential for understanding the emergence and development of life on Earth. Topics include the new biotechnology of applied molecular evolution, with its important implications for developing new drugs and vaccines; the balance between order and chaos observed in many naturally occurring systems; new insights concerning the predictive power of statistical mechanics in biology; and other major issues. Indeed, the approaches investigated here may prove to be the new center around which biological science itself will evolve. The work is written for all those interested in the cutting edge of research in the life sciences.
Download or read book Self organization of Matter written by Christian Jooss and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Self-organization of matter is observed in every context and on all scales, from the nanoscale of quantum fields and subatomic particles to the macroscale of galaxy superclusters. This book analyzes the wide range of patterns of organization present in nature, highlighting their similarities rather than their differences. This unconventional approach results in an illuminating read which should be part of any Physics student's background.
Download or read book The Origins of Order written by Stuart A. Kauffman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1993 with total page 744 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph extends the basic concepts of Darwinian evolution to accommodate recent findings and perspectives from the fields of biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics. It explains how complex systems, contrary to expectations, can spontaneously exhibit degrees of order.
Download or read book The Self organizing Universe written by Erich Jantsch and published by Pergamon. This book was released on 1980 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book, with its emphasis on the interaction of microstructures with the entire biosphere, ecosystems etc., and on how micro- and macrocosmos mutually create the conditions for their further evolution, provides a comprehensive framework for a deeper understanding of human creativity in a time of transition.
Download or read book Self Organizing Systems written by F.Eugene Yates and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book How Nature Works written by Per Bak and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Self-organized criticality, the spontaneous development of systems to a critical state, is the first general theory of complex systems with a firm mathematical basis. This theory describes how many seemingly desperate aspects of the world, from stock market crashes to mass extinctions, avalanches to solar flares, all share a set of simple, easily described properties. "...a'must read'...Bak writes with such ease and lucidity, and his ideas are so intriguing...essential reading for those interested in complex systems...it will reward a sufficiently skeptical reader." -NATURE "...presents the theory (self-organized criticality) in a form easily absorbed by the non-mathematically inclined reader." -BOSTON BOOK REVIEW "I picture Bak as a kind of scientific musketeer; flamboyant, touchy, full of swagger and ready to join every fray... His book is written with panache. The style is brisk, the content stimulating. I recommend it as a bracing experience." -NEW SCIENTIST
Download or read book At Home in the Universe written by Stuart Kauffman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-11-21 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Design for Evolution written by Erich Jantsch and published by George Braziller. This book was released on 1975 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Design in Nature written by Adrian Bejan and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking book, Adrian Bejan takes the recurring patterns in nature—trees, tributaries, air passages, neural networks, and lightning bolts—and reveals how a single principle of physics, the constructal law, accounts for the evolution of these and many other designs in our world. Everything—from biological life to inanimate systems—generates shape and structure and evolves in a sequence of ever-improving designs in order to facilitate flow. River basins, cardiovascular systems, and bolts of lightning are very efficient flow systems to move a current—of water, blood, or electricity. Likewise, the more complex architecture of animals evolve to cover greater distance per unit of useful energy, or increase their flow across the land. Such designs also appear in human organizations, like the hierarchical “flowcharts” or reporting structures in corporations and political bodies. All are governed by the same principle, known as the constructal law, and configure and reconfigure themselves over time to flow more efficiently. Written in an easy style that achieves clarity without sacrificing complexity, Design in Nature is a paradigm-shifting book that will fundamentally transform our understanding of the world around us.
Download or read book Origins of Life The Primal Self Organization written by Richard Egel and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-08-31 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If theoretical physicists can seriously entertain canonical “standard models” even for the big-bang generation of the entire universe, why cannot life scientists reach a consensus on how life has emerged and settled on this planet? Scientists are hindered by conceptual gaps between bottom-up inferences (from early Earth geological conditions) and top-down extrapolations (from modern life forms to common ancestral states). This book challenges several widely held assumptions and argues for alternative approaches instead. Primal syntheses (literally or figuratively speaking) are called for in at least five major areas. (1) The first RNA-like molecules may have been selected by solar light as being exceptionally photostable. (2) Photosynthetically active minerals and reduced phosphorus compounds could have efficiently coupled the persistent natural energy flows to the primordial metabolism. (3) Stochastic, uncoded peptides may have kick-started an ever-tightening co-evolution of proteins and nucleic acids. (4) The living fossils from the primeval RNA World thrive within modern cells. (5) From the inherently complex protocellular associations preceding the consolidation of integral genomes, eukaryotic cell organization may have evolved more naturally than simple prokaryote-like life forms. – If this book can motivate dedicated researchers to further explore the alternative mechanisms presented, it will have served its purpose well.
Download or read book Self Organization in Nonequilibrium Systems written by Gregoire Nicolis and published by Wiley-VCH. This book was released on 1977-05-13 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Self Organization as a New Paradigm in Evolutionary Biology written by Anne Dambricourt Malassé and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-07-04 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The epistemological synthesis of the various theories of evolution, since the first formulation in 1802 with the transmission of the inherited characters by J.B. Lamarck, shows the need for an alternative synthesis to that of Princeton (1947). This new synthesis integrates the scientific models of self-organization developed during the second half of the 20th century based on the laws of physics, thermodynamics, and mathematics with the emergent evolutionary problematics such as self-organized memory. This book shows, how self-organization is integrated in modern evolutionary biology. It is divided in two parts: The first part pays attention to the modern observations in paleontology and biology, which include major theoreticians of the self-organization (d’Arcy Thompson, Henri Bergson, René Thom, Ilya Prigogine). The second part presents different emergent evolutionary models including the sciences of complexity, the non-linear dynamical systems, fractals, attractors, epigenesis, systemics, and mesology with different examples of the sciences of complexity and self-organization as observed in the human lineage, from both internal (embryogenesis-morphogenesis) and external (mesology) viewpoints.
Download or read book A World Beyond Physics written by Stuart A. Kauffman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did life start? Is the evolution of life describable by any physics-like laws? Stuart Kauffman's latest book offers an explanation-beyond what the laws of physics can explain-of the progression from a complex chemical environment to molecular reproduction, metabolism and to early protocells, and further evolution to what we recognize as life. Among the estimated one hundred billion solar systems in the known universe, evolving life is surely abundant. That evolution is a process of "becoming" in each case. Since Newton, we have turned to physics to assess reality. But physics alone cannot tell us where we came from, how we arrived, and why our world has evolved past the point of unicellular organisms to an extremely complex biosphere. Building on concepts from his work as a complex systems researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, Kauffman focuses in particular on the idea of cells constructing themselves and introduces concepts such as "constraint closure." Living systems are defined by the concept of "organization" which has not been focused on in enough in previous works. Cells are autopoetic systems that build themselves: they literally construct their own constraints on the release of energy into a few degrees of freedom that constitutes the very thermodynamic work by which they build their own self creating constraints. Living cells are "machines" that construct and assemble their own working parts. The emergence of such systems-the origin of life problem-was probably a spontaneous phase transition to self-reproduction in complex enough prebiotic systems. The resulting protocells were capable of Darwin's heritable variation, hence open-ended evolution by natural selection. Evolution propagates this burgeoning organization. Evolving living creatures, by existing, create new niches into which yet further new creatures can emerge. If life is abundant in the universe, this self-constructing, propagating, exploding diversity takes us beyond physics to biospheres everywhere.
Download or read book Self Organization in Complex Ecosystems MPB 42 written by Ricard Solé and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-06 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can physics be an appropriate framework for the understanding of ecological science? Most ecologists would probably agree that there is little relation between the complexity of natural ecosystems and the simplicity of any example derived from Newtonian physics. Though ecologists have long been interested in concepts originally developed by statistical physicists and later applied to explain everything from why stock markets crash to why rivers develop particular branching patterns, applying such concepts to ecosystems has remained a challenge. Self-Organization in Complex Ecosystems is the first book to clearly synthesize what we have learned about the usefulness of tools from statistical physics in ecology. Ricard Solé and Jordi Bascompte provide a comprehensive introduction to complex systems theory, and ask: do universal laws shape the structure of ecosystems, at least at some scales? They offer the most compelling array of theoretical evidence to date of the potential of nonlinear ecological interactions to generate nonrandom, self-organized patterns at all levels. Tackling classic ecological questions--from population dynamics to biodiversity to macroevolution--the book's novel presentation of theories and data shows the power of statistical physics and complexity in ecology. Self-Organization in Complex Ecosystems will be a staple resource for years to come for ecologists interested in complex systems theory as well as mathematicians and physicists interested in ecology.
Download or read book Self Organization in Biological Systems written by Scott Camazine and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Self organized Complexity in the Physical Biological and Social Sciences written by Donald Lawson Turcotte and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
