Jordi Piñero 

Biological evolution is punctuated by the presence of large innovation events (such as the genetic code, cellular life, multicellularity, cooperation, parasitism or language, among others) that gave birth to deep qualitative changes in life’s organisation. These innovations allow creating new structures, achieving higher complexity, either out of new interactions among elements at the lower level or as a result of new ways of processing information. These two mechanisms appear to be almost indistinguishable in many cases.

Such convergence and the fact that some generic properties can be crucial to explain the origin and nature of major transitions suggests that we could formulate a theory in which statistical physics methods could play a central role. In this project we start an ambitious program of theoretical (but experimentally driven) exploration where we will analyse some of the key transitions where a rigorous framework can be defined, using in particular the formalism of the physics of phase transitions.