Complexity Cat

Review | Undecidability and Irreducibility Conditions for Open-Ended Evolution and Emergence

While there is not full consensus on how to define the specifics of Open-Ended Evolution (OEE), at a high level it describes organisms that are continuously evolving and changing, rather than eventually reaching a state where nothing changes. The paper I am going to review today proposes a formal framework for discussing OEE. Surprisingly, the authors allude to undecidability and computational irreducibility, which reminds us of many other narratives we have discussed here. What's new under their lens? Is evolution a computational phenomenon?

Review | Unified representation of Life’s basic properties by a 3-species Stochastic Cubic Autocatalytic Reaction-Diffusion system of equations

Reproduction, growth, development, homeostasis, metabolism, adaptation, evolution... we could go on and on and never find a complete list of characteristics that define life. However, another question is how to represent those properties using mathematical tools. Today we review an article by Muñuzuri and Pérez-Mercader whose objective is precisely that—to capture the key properties of life using a set of equations.