Abstract
In the fourth paper of this Special Issue, we bridge the theoretical debate on the role of memory and criticality discussed in the three earlier manuscripts, with a review of key concepts in biology and focus on cell-to-cell communication in organismal development. While all living organisms are dynamic complex networks of organization and disorder, most studies in biology have used energy and biochemical exchange to explain cell differentiation without considering the importance of information (entropy) transfer. While all complex networks are mixtures of patterns of complexity (non-crucial and crucial events), it is the crucial events that determine the efficiency of information transfer, especially during key transitions, such as in embryogenesis. With increasing multicellularity, emergent relationships from cell-to-cell communication create reaction–diffusion exchanges of different concentrations of biochemicals or morphogenetic gradients resulting in differential gene expression. We suggest that in conjunction with morphogenetic gradients, there exist gradients of information transfer creating cybernetic loops of stability and disorder, setting the stage for adaptive capability. We specifically reference results from the second paper in this Special Issue, which correlated biophotons with lentil seed germination to show that phase transitions accompany changes in complexity patterns during development. Criticality, therefore, appears to be an important factor in the transmission, transfer and coding of information for complex adaptive system development.
Highlights
All living organisms are in a dynamic balance between organization and disorder as they undergo renewal through processes such as development and regeneration
Following the three previous papers in this Special Issue on “Memory and Criticality”, we propose in this paper that development of a living organism can be considered an emergent complex adaptive system undergoing cr iticality, and that developing organisms are in a dynamic process of self-organization that generate crucial events, as detected using diffusional entropy analysis (DEA) described in [7,9]
Benfatto et al [6] concluded that using DEA as the statistical analysis in conjunction with changes in biophoton emissions suggests that criticality appears to be an important factor in the transmission, transfer and coding of information important to multi-component processes in living organisms, such as germination in plant seeds
Summary
All living organisms are in a dynamic balance between organization and disorder as they undergo renewal through processes such as development and regeneration. New work from statistical physics [6,7,8] in this Special Issue suggests information transfer offers a new, more synoptic approach to understanding the evolution of complexity in living organisms. The authors of [24] used modified DEA (MDEA), to investigate spectra of the heartbeats of autonomic neuropathy patients that exhibited 1/f noise and showed an increase of the scaling parameter from μ = 2 (healthy conditions) to μ = 3 (on the border of ordinary statistical physics) as the disease progressed Such shifts in criticality may accompany bioelectric pathways, which when altered, reveal changes in pattern memory in planaria (worm) and deer antler regeneration [25]. When biophoton emission rates are used in conjunction with an analytical technique called diffusion entropy analysis (DEA) [7,26,27] biophotons have the potential to document dynamic changes of complexity in a developing organism or complex adaptive system
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