Dynamical Properties of Random Boolean Hypernetworks

Kevin M. Stoltz, Cliff A. Joslyn

Boolean networks are a valuable class of discrete dynamical systems models, but they remain fundamentally limited by their inability to capture multi-way interactions in their components. To remedy this limitation, we propose a model of Boolean hypernetworks, which generalize standard Boolean networks. Utilizing the bijection between hypernetworks and bipartite networks, we show how Boolean hypernetworks generalize standard Boolean networks. We derive ensembles of Boolean hypernetworks from standard random Boolean networks and simulate the dynamics of each. Our results indicate that several properties of Boolean network dynamics are affected by the addition of multi-way interactions, and that these additions can have stabilizing or destabilizing effects.

Read the full article at: arxiv.org

What Emergence Can Possibly Mean

Sean M. Carroll & Achyuth Parola

We consider emergence from the perspective of dynamics: states of a system evolving with time. We focus on the role of a decomposition of wholes into parts, and attempt to characterize relationships between levels without reference to whether higher-level properties are “novel” or “unexpected.” We offer a classification of different varieties of emergence, with and without new ontological elements at higher levels.

Read the full article at: philarchive.org

Winter Workshop on Complex Systems 2025

The Winter Workshop on Complex Systems is a one-week workshop where young researchers worldwide come together to work on interdisciplinary projects around complex systems.

The primary focus of the workshop is for participants to engage into novel research projects.

This is the 10th edition of the WWCS and it will be held in Rifugio Madonna delle Nevi (Lombardy, Italy) from the 26th to the 31st of January 2025.

More at: wwcs2025.github.io

The Complex World: An Introduction to the Foundations of Complexity Science

The Complex World, originally published in Volume 1 of Foundational Papers in Complexity Science, presents an entirely new framing of nature, of the human role in the natural and technological worlds, and what it means to prosper on a living planet.

We live in a complex world—meaning one that is increasingly connected, evolving, technological, volatile, and potentially poised for catastrophe. And yet we continue to treat the world as if it were simple: linear, unchanging, disconnected, and infinitely exploitable.

Complexity science is an approach to understanding and surviving in a complex world. In this concise and comprehensive introduction, Santa Fe Institute President David C. Krakauer traces the roots of complexity science back to the nineteenth-century science of machines—evolved and engineered—into the twentieth-century science of emergent systems.

By combining insights from evolution, computation, nonlinear dynamics, and statistical physics, complexity science provides the first scientific framework for understanding the purposeful universe.

More at: www.sfipress.org

Irreversibility in bacterial regulatory networks

YI ZHAO, THOMAS P. WYTOCK, KIMBERLY A. REYNOLDS, AND ADILSON E. MOTTER 
SCIENCE ADVANCES
28 Aug 2024
Vol 10, Issue 35

Irreversibility, in which a transient perturbation leaves a system in a new state, is an emergent property in systems of interacting entities. This property has well-established implications in statistical physics but remains underexplored in biological networks, especially for bacteria and other prokaryotes whose regulation of gene expression occurs predominantly at the transcriptional level. Focusing on the reconstructed regulatory network of Escherichia coli, we examine network responses to transient single-gene perturbations. We predict irreversibility in numerous cases and find that the incidence of irreversibility increases with the proximity of the perturbed gene to positive circuits in the network. Comparison with experimental data suggests a connection between the predicted irreversibility to transient perturbations and the evolutionary response to permanent perturbations.

Read the full article at: www.science.org