Information and uncertainty in living systems, a view from ecology.
The organization of living entities combines, in close proximity and partial overlap, dissipative and self-organizing systems. Their superposition, in which gradients of opposite signification cross, allows local discontinuities to occur, and in them a place for marginal chaos and fractal configurations. Among other features, a difference in turnover speed characterizes such coupling, higher on the relatively more uniform domain where entropy increases more easily, and lower at the more minutely organized places of preferential information accretion. At the level of elementary physical events, logical aspects of indeterminacy could perhaps be clarified by an observer, assuming that the living system performs the role of a witness of historical progress.
Margalef
R
R
University of Barcelona, Spain.
D004463:Ecology; D017709:Fractals; D007257:Information Theory; D013598:Systems Theory; D013816:Thermodynamics