Authors
William Gilpin
Published in
PLoS computational biology. Volume 21. Issue 5. Pages e1013051. May 05, 2025. Epub May 05, 2025.
Abstract
Living systems operate far from equilibrium, yet few general frameworks provide global bounds on biological transients. In high-dimensional biological networks like ecosystems, long transients arise from the separate timescales of interactions within versus among subcommunities. Here, we use tools from computational complexity theory to frame equilibration in complex ecosystems as the process of solving an analogue optimization problem. We show that functional redundancies among species in an ecosystem produce difficult, ill-conditioned problems, which physically manifest as transient chaos. We find that the recent success of dimensionality reduction methods in describing ecological dynamics arises due to preconditioning, in which fast relaxation decouples from slow solving timescales. In evolutionary simulations, we show that selection for steady-state species diversity produces ill-conditioning, an effect quantifiable using scaling relations originally derived for numerical analysis of complex optimization problems. Our results demonstrate the physical toll of computational constraints on biological dynamics.
PMID:
40324147
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 06 May 2025.
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