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Complexity: the organizing principle at the interface of biological (dis)order

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Abstract

The term complexity means several things to biologists. When qualifying morphological phenotype, on the one hand, it is used to signify the sheer complicatedness of living systems, especially as a result of the multicomponent aspect of biological form. On the other hand, it has been used to represent the intricate nature of the connections between constituents that make up form: a more process-based explanation. In the context of evolutionary arguments, complexity has been defined, in a quantifiable fashion, as the amount of information, an informatic template such as a sequence of nucleotides or amino acids stores about its environment. In this perspective, we begin with a brief review of the history of complexity theory. We then introduce a developmental and an evolutionary understanding of what it means for biological systems to be complex. We propose that the complexity of living systems can be understood through two interdependent structural properties: multiscalarity of interconstituent mechanisms and excitability of the biological materials. The answer to whether a system becomes more or less complex over time depends on the potential for its constituents to interact in novel ways and combinations to give rise to new structures and functions, as well as on the evolution of excitable properties that would facilitate the exploration of interconstituent organization in the context of their microenvironments and macroenvironments.

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Acknowledgements

R.B. would like to thank the organizers of 3rd Foundations of Biology meeting held at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, where an intense dialogue with the participants on complexity led to several of the ideas proposed in this manuscript. We would also like to thank Stuart A. Newman, Tilmann Glimm, Christopher Rose, I. S. Mian and three anonymous reviewers for providing valuable criticisms on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

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  1. Department of Molecular Reproduction Development and Genetics, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru,  560 012, India

    Ramray Bhat & Dharma Pally

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  1. Ramray Bhat
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  2. Dharma Pally
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Correspondence to Ramray Bhat.

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Corresponding editor: T. N. C. Vidya

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Bhat, R., Pally, D. Complexity: the organizing principle at the interface of biological (dis)order. J Genet 96, 431–444 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12041-017-0793-8

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