Biological complexity: does life exist on the edge of chaos? (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, December 16, 2023, 16:14 (133 days ago) @ David Turell

An attempted answer:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2408679-life-may-be-less-chaotic-than-we-thought-s...

"Life may not exist at the “edge of chaos” after all. The long-standing belief has been challenged by computer simulations of dozens of processes within cells.

"A hallmark of chaotic systems is that a small disturbance can lead to an outsized effect. The famous butterfly effect offers a classic example, where a flap of an insect’s wings is proposed to cause a storm many kilometres away. Since the late 1980s, researchers have believed that life has evolved to exist right at the edge of this kind of chaos in its search for the middle ground between being adaptable to the environment and remaining stable enough to survive.

“'The idea of the edge of chaos is that cells want to have as much sensitivity as they possibly can, without going into this chaotic regime where the tiniest breeze makes the cell fall apart,” says Jordan Rozum at Binghamton University in New York. “For a long time, people have thought that this edge of chaos phenomenon happens not only at the level of whole cells or organisms, but also if you look at the specific jobs that the cell has to do.”

***

"Rozum and his colleagues set out to test the edge of chaos idea using dozens of models that are rigorously rooted in biological studies.

"They chose 72 experiment-based models representing processes ranging from cell death to gene regulation in the bacterium Escherichia coli. The models came from the Cell Collective database, which collects the work of many independent researchers.

***

"Across the models, their conclusion was the same: life is remarkably good at recovering from perturbations, which wouldn’t be the case if it existed at the edge of chaos.

"Christof Teuscher at Portland State University in Oregon says the new computational method is an exciting tool and the conclusions it led to complicate the discussion of what exactly the edge of chaos is.

"Though models rigorously rooted in laboratory studies haven’t been so extensively studied before, the new study may still include too few of them for generalising its conclusions to all life, he says. There is no question that living organisms exist at “sweet spots” somewhere between order and chaos, but it remains an open question how similar those spots are across all life forms and all of life’s processes, says Teuscher.

"For Rozum, the new study is not the nail in the coffin for the edge of chaos hypothesis, but an incentive to characterise it better. While he and his colleagues showed that many cellular processes themselves are far from the edge of chaos, it could still be true that when they all combine the cell as a whole moves closer to chaos, he says. The researchers plan on studying that idea next, using even more complex computer simulations."

Comment: 'at the edge of chaos' implies the cell might degenerate in functions if a mistake happens. That does not appear to be the case. Cells continue to function with a mistake.