Over the past century, the generalized Lotka–Volterra (GLV) model has grown from a mathematical curiosity to a cornerstone of theoretical ecology. Here we celebrate the enduring legacy of Lotka and Vo...

Abstract. Systems biology offers valuable insights into ageing by integrating experimental data with mathematical models and bioinformatics tools. Long-liv

Abstract. We provide a conceptual framework and empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that within-individual and independent variation in floral rew

New study identifies ‘mechanotypes’ as the physical links between genes and body shapes, explaining how diverse forms arise in animals

How and why do complex chemical and biological systems self-organize into ordered states far from thermodynamic equilibrium? Despite advances in thermodynamics, kinetics, and information theory, a unifying principle that links organization and efficiency across scales has remained elusive. In open systems, productive-event trajectories are conditioned on starting at a source and ending at a sink. This work proposes a stochastic–dissipative least-action triad framework in which (i) a path-ensemble weighting biases trajectories by their action cost, (ii) feedback processes sharpen this distribution, and (iii) the ensemble evolves toward a least-average-action attractor, decreasing during self-organization and increasing during decay. A parametric cross-scale metric—Average Action Efficiency (AAE)—is defined, which is inversely proportional to the average action per productive event. Under reinforcing feedback, identities derived from the exponential-family path measure show that the average action decreases and AAE rises monotonically. In future extensions, this formulation could help bridge quantum, classical, and biological regimes while remaining computationally tractable, because its empirical version relies on aggregate energetic and timing data rather than enumerating individual trajectories. AAE reaches a local maximum at a non-equilibrium steady state under fixed operational context, consistent with the present formulation, and connections to thermodynamic and informational measures are made. A companion article (Part II) details empirical estimation strategies and applications (Georgiev, 2025a). Georgi Yordanov Georgiev BioSystems Volume 262, April 2026, 105647 Read the full article at: www.sciencedirect.com See Also: Part II: Empirical estimation, Average Action Efficiency, and applications to ATP synthase

Phyllotaxis—the arrangement of plant organs around their supporting axes—is an important attribute of plant architecture. Recent experimental data show that the first phase of typical phyllotactic ...

The process of evolution by natural selection leads to fitness-maximising phenotypes. On the level of cellular chemical reaction networks, maximising fitness can mean optimising a variety of fitness f...

En una ciudad que crece a ritmo acelerado, caminar debería ser un derecho, no un riesgo. Sin embargo

El Gobierno de Netanyahu se ufana de haber golpeado 200 objetivos “terroristas” en 48 horas y el ejército anuncia un inminente “ataque sin precedentes”

The company’s turbines — enough to power 280,000 homes — run without emission controls in an area that leads Tennessee in asthma hospitalizations.

¿Cuántas veces hemos leído o escuchado la expresión “eso es ideología de género”, sobre todo de part

Amid growing concerns over Big Tech firms aligning with Trump administration policies, people are starting to move their digital lives to services based overseas. Here's what you need to know.

Melanie Mitchell has worked on digital minds for decades. She says they’ll never truly be like ours until they can make analogies.

The dictum “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler” poses a problem for biology. How simply can it be told without doing damage to its complex nature? The answer might be foun...

Information dynamics are key in complex systems. The authors apply graph neural networks to group components for coarse-graining networks, reducing computational complexity. Their approach preserves i...

Complex network approaches have been emerging as an analysis tool for dynamical systems. Different reconstruction methods from time series have been shown to re

Humpback whale song is a culturally transmitted behavior. Human language, which is also culturally transmitted, has statistically coherent parts whose frequency distribution follows a power law. These...