This set of lecture notes gives a first coherent account of a novel aspect of the living world that can be called biological information. The book presents both a pedagogical and state-of-the art roadmap of this rapidly evolving area and covers the whole field, from information which is encoded in the molecular genetic code to the description of large-scale evolution of complex species networks. The book will prove useful for all those who work at the interface of biology, physics and information science.

This set of lecture notes gives a first coherent account of a novel aspect of the living world that can be called biological information. The book presents both a pedagogical and state-of-the art roadmap of this rapidly evolving area and covers the whole field, from information which is encoded in the molecular genetic code to the description of large-scale evolution of complex species networks. The book will prove useful for all those who work at the interface of biology, physics and information science.

Analyzes approaches to the study of complexity in the physical, biological, and social sciences.

This book for physicists, biologists, computer scientists, economists or social scientists shows in selected examples how computer simulation methods which are typical to statistical physics have been applied in other areas outside of physics. Our main part deals with the biology of ageing, while other examples are the functioning of the immune system, the structure of DNA, the fluctuations on the stock market, theories for sociology and for World War II. Are leaky water faucets similar to our heartbeats? Throughout the book we emphasize microscopic models dealing with the action of individuals, whether they are cells of the immune system or traders speculating on the currency market. Complete computer programs are given and explained for biological ageing. The references try to introduce the expert from the covered other fields to the relevant physics literature; and they also show the physicists the way into the biological literature on ageing.

This third edition of Statistical Physics of Complex Systems has been expanded to provide more examples of applications of concepts and methods from statistical physics to the modeling of complex systems. These include avalanche dynamics in materials, models of social agents like road traffic or wealth repartition, the real space aspects of biological evolution dynamics, propagation phenomena on complex networks, formal neural networks and their connection to constraint satisfaction problems. This course-tested textbook provides graduate students and non-specialists with a basic understanding of the concepts and methods of statistical physics and demonstrates their wide range of applications to interdisciplinary topics in the field of complex system sciences, including selected aspects of theoretical modeling in biology and the social sciences. It covers topics such as non-conserved particles, evolutionary population dynamics, networks, properties of both individual and coupled simple dynamical systems, and convergence theorems, as well as short appendices that offer helpful hints on how to perform simple stochastic simulations in practice. The original spirit of the book is to remain accessible to a broad, non-specialized readership. The format is a set of concise, modular, and self-contained topical chapters, avoiding technicalities and jargon as much as possible, and complemented by a wealth of worked-out examples, so as to make this work useful as a self-study text or as textbook for short courses.