一个量化生物复杂性的概率框架
A Probabilistic Framework for Quantifying Biological Complexity
摘要：
区分生物和无生命物质的一件事是它们能够大量产生类似的复杂或非随机结构。从DNA序列到折叠的蛋白质结构、活细胞、微生物群落和多细胞结构，生物学中的材料构型可以很容易地与非生命材料组装体区分开来。这也适用于复杂有机体的产品，这些产品本身可以制造复杂的工具，机器和人工制品。虽然这些物体不是活的，但它们不能随机形成，因为它们是生物有机体的产物，因此是技术或文化生物特征。问题是，如何推广一种旨在评估复杂物体作为可能的生物特征的方法并不明显。然而，如果可能的话，这种自给自足的方法可能有助于探索宇宙中的新生命形式。这就需要我们严格证明，一个给定的人工制品太复杂了，不可能是偶然形成的。在本文中，我们提出了一种新型的复杂性度量，途径复杂性，使我们不仅可以阈值的非生物-生物的鸿沟，但证明了一种概率方法的基础上，对象的丰度和复杂性，可用于明确分配复杂的对象作为生物签名。我们希望这种方法不仅能开启对地球以外生物特征的探索，还能让我们探索地球上的新型生物，并观察实验室中发现的复杂化学系统何时可以被认为是活着的。
英文摘要：
One thing that discriminates living things from inanimate matter is their ability to generate similarly complex or non-random architectures in a large abundance. From DNA sequences to folded protein structures, living cells, microbial communities and multicellular structures, the material configurations in biology can easily be distinguished from non-living material assemblies. This is also true of the products of complex organisms that can themselves construct complex tools, machines, and artefacts. Whilst these objects are not living, they cannot randomly form, as they are the product of a biological organism and hence are either technological or cultural biosignatures. The problem is that it is not obvious how it might be possible to generalise an approach that aims to evaluate complex objects as possible biosignatures. However, if it was possible such a self-contained approach could be useful to explore the cosmos for new life forms. This would require us to prove rigorously that a given artefact is too complex to have formed by chance. In this paper, we present a new type of complexity measure, Pathway Complexity, that allows us to not only threshold the abiotic-biotic divide, but to demonstrate a probabilistic approach based upon object abundance and complexity which can be used to unambiguously assign complex objects as biosignatures. We hope that this approach not only opens up the search for biosignatures beyond earth, but allow us to explore earth for new types of biology, as well as observing when a complex chemical system discovered in the laboratory could be considered alive.
机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来，可能存在错误，请以论文正文为准。
