Fundamental Complexity Measures of Life

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges in defining and measuring complexity in biological systems and proposes a quantitative framework to better understand the fundamental aspects of life and evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach to quantify complexity in biological organization, aiming to clarify the nature of life and evolutionary processes.

Findings

Proposes a quantitative framework for biological complexity

Addresses confusion in complexity measures and the nature of life

Provides insights into biological evolution through complexity analysis

Abstract

At present, there is a great deal of confusion regarding complexity and its measures (reviews on complexity measures are found in, e.g. Lloyd, 2001 and Shalizi, 2006 and more references therein). Moreover, there is also confusion regarding the nature of life. In this situation, it seems the task of determining the fundamental complexity measures of life is especially difficult. Yet this task is just part of a greater task: obtaining substantial insights into the nature of biological evolution. We think that without a firm quantitative basis characterizing the most fundamental aspects of life, it is impossible to overcome the confusion so as to clarify the nature of biological evolution. The approach we present here offers such quantitative measures of complexity characterizing biological organization and, as we will see, evolution.