Special Issue "Complexity and Evolution, 2nd Edition" is open for submission

Guest Editors: Dr. Francis Heylighen and Dr. Tomas Veloz

Submit to the Special Issue: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/special_issues/complexity_and_evolution

Submission deadline: 11 December 2024

Special Issue Information: The understanding of evolutionary processes is one of the most important issues of scientific enquiry of this century. Scientific thinking in twentieth century witnessed the overwhelming power of the evolutionary paradigm. It not only solidified the foundations of diverse areas such as cell biology, ecology, and economics, but also fostered the development of several mathematical and computational tools to model and simulate how evolutionary processes take place.

Besides the application of the evolutionary paradigm and the discovery of the evolutionary features for diverse processes, there is another interesting aspect which touches upon the emergence of novel evolutionary processes. Generally, the emergence of an evolutionary process requires a complex transition between a prior form where no evolutionary process is occurring and a posterior form where the evolutionary process has been triggered. Most advanced methods used to understand the emergence of evolutionary processes require the consideration of systemic features such as self-organization, autopoiesis, resilience, goal-directedness, etc.

To address these aspects in evolutionary theories, it is necessary to propose and apply methods that both incorporate recent advances in the modeling of complex systems and leverage both the increasing modeling power as well as growth and integration of databases associated with evolutionary processes. We welcome interdisciplinary articles that aim to advance our understanding of the role played by complexity in the evolution of natural and artificial processes. We welcome articles related to the following topics:

• Biological evolution;
• Cognitive evolution;
• Social evolution;
• Evolutionary processes of artificial systems;
• The emergence of evolutionary processes;
• Novel methods to study the structural properties of evolutionary processes.