Collective Behavior in Dissipative Systems: Glimpses into Integration of Physics and Biology

Self-organization is a property of complex systems whereby collective behavior and the convergence of appropriate conditions in the system gives rise to emergent patterns. Dissipative systems are long known to exhibit self-organized patterns which have been of considerable interest to mathematicians, physicists, biologists and ecological-psychologists. In this talk we will examine a few different systems, physical and biological, with the aim of building a bridge between these fields. The larger question that we ask, is an ambitious one: can patterns in living and nonliving have a common origin? We can make some inroads into this seemingly difficult question by looking at how various systems – individual students in the classroom, a sports team or a chemical system - learn and adapt to their environments. We utilize the mathematical tools of complexity theory, namely network analysis, dynamical systems and thermodynamics to design and analyze the problem. Our study shows that sufficiently complex systems reveal similar evolutionary learning profiles, which has implications in various contexts, which will be discussed in the talk.