Generic Criticality in Ecological and Neuronal Networks

2015/08/10 by David A. Kessler, Kessler, David A., Herbert Levine +1
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Physics and Astronomy · #Disordered Systems and Neural Networks (cond-mat.dis-nn) #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC) #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE) #cond-mat.dis-nn #q-bio.NC #q-bio.PE

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1508.02414

arxiv created 2015/08/10 · arxiv updated 2015/08/12

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of two models of biological networks with purely suppressive interactions between the units; species interacting via niche competition and neurons via inhibitory synaptic coupling. In both of these cases, power-law scaling of the density of states with probability arises without any fine-tuning of the model parameters. These results argue against the increasingly popular notion that non-equilibrium living systems operate at special critical points, driven by there by evolution so as to enable adaptive processing of input data.

Related

• Mechanisms of self-organized quasicriticality in neuronal networks models
• Are biological systems poised at criticality?
• Inhibition as a determinant of activity and criticality in dynamical networks
• Self-organized criticality in neural networks
• A Minimal Network of Brain Dynamics: Hierarchy of Approximations to Quasi-critical Neural Network Dynamics