Complexity Cat

Review | From extended phenotype to extended affordance: distributed language at the intersection of Gibson and Dawkins

During NERCCS 2025 I had the opportunity to meet Dennis P. Waters, a transdisciplinary thinker whose PhD was done under the direction of Howard Pattee. With Dennis I had the opportunity to talk about biosemiotics, relational biology and ecological psychology, conversations from which I learned a lot. Today I am going to review one of his papers, published more than ten years ago but with very interesting ideas.

Review | The Nature of Organization in Living Systems

A year ago, Pedro Márquez-Zacarías gave a seminar at my university that inspired me to delve deeper into the ideas proposed by Robert Rosen. A month ago, he and his collaborators at the Santa Fe Institute have proposed a new relational biology framework to characterize how self-organizing living processes arise from more basic components. What are the main gaps in this model? Can we reconcile it with other relational models proposed in the last decade?