Self-organized Criticality in Living Systems

Chris Adami

We suggest that ensembles of self-replicating entities such as biological systems naturally evolve into a self-organized critical state in which fluctuations, as well as waiting times between phase transitions ("epochs"), are distributed according to a 1/f power law. We demonstrate these concepts by analyzing a population of coexisting self-replicating strings (segments of computer code) subject to mutation and survival of the fittest.
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