…criticality and dynamical scaling..
me: I keep returning to this kind of thing since I first learned about it as a teenager in the 1980s. It provides substantial coverage for issues, which is why it also has attracted its fair share of woo. But it feels like my native language regardless.
Colloquium: Criticality and dynamical scaling in living systems, Miguel A. Munoz, 2018, 34 pgs
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis suggests that some biological systems –parts, aspects, or groups of them– may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and disorder, i.e. in the vicinity of the critical point of a phase transition. Criticality has been argued to provide biological systems with an optimal balance between robustness against perturbations and flexibility to adapt to changing conditions, as well as to confer on them optimal computational capabilities, huge dynamical repertoires, unparalleled sensitivity to stimuli, etc. Criticality, with its concomitant scale invariance, can be conjectured to emerge in living systems as the result of adaptive and evolutionary processes that, for reasons to be fully elucidated, select for it as a template upon which further layers of complexity can rest. This hypothesis is very suggestive as it proposes that criticality could constitute a general and common organizing strategy in biology stemming from the physics of phase transitions. However, despite its thrilling implications, this is still in its embryonic state as a well-founded theory and, as such, it has elicited some healthy skepticism. From the experimental side, the advent of high-throughput technologies has created new prospects in the exploration of biological systems, and empirical evidence in favor of criticality has proliferated, with examples ranging from endogenous brain activity and gene-expression patterns, to flocks of birds and insect-colony foraging, to name but a few. Some pieces of evidence are quite remarkable, while in some other cases empirical data are limited, incomplete, or not fully convincing. More stringent experimental set-ups and theoretical analyses are certainly needed to fully clarify the picture. In any case, the time seems ripe for bridging the gap between this theoretical conjecture and its empirical validation. Given the profound implications of shedding light on this issue, we believe that it is both pertinent and timely to review the state of the art and to discuss future strategies and perspectives.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.04499.pdf