Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.
School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.
Theory Biosci. 2021 Nov;140(4):325-341. doi: 10.1007/s12064-020-00331-5. Epub 2021 Feb 2.
Collective behavior is widely regarded as a hallmark property of living and intelligent systems. Yet, many examples are known of simple physical systems that are not alive, which nonetheless display collective behavior too, prompting simple physical models to often be adopted to explain living collective behaviors. To understand collective behavior as it occurs in living examples, it is important to determine whether or not there exist fundamental differences in how non-living and living systems act collectively, as well as the limits of the intuition that can be built from simpler, physical examples in explaining biological phenomenon. Here, we propose a framework for comparing non-living and living collectives as a continuum based on their information architecture: that is, how information is stored and processed across different degrees of freedom. We review diverse examples of collective phenomena, characterized from an information-theoretic perspective, and offer views on future directions for quantifying living collective behaviors based on their informational structure.
集体行为被广泛认为是生命和智能系统的标志性特征。然而，有许多已知的简单物理系统并非生命系统，但它们也表现出了集体行为，这促使人们经常采用简单的物理模型来解释生命的集体行为。为了理解生命系统中出现的集体行为，重要的是要确定非生命和生命系统在集体行为方面是否存在根本的差异，以及从更简单的物理实例中构建的直觉在解释生物现象方面的局限性。在这里，我们提出了一个基于信息架构的连续统框架来比较非生命和生命的集体行为：即信息是如何在不同自由度下存储和处理的。我们回顾了不同的集体现象的例子，从信息论的角度进行了特征描述，并对基于信息结构量化生命集体行为的未来方向提出了看法。
