The Genealogy of Interactions as a determinant of the individual and systemic response in biological models.
Creators: name: Rodríguez, Patricio
name: Âlvaro Plaza
Publisher: name: F1000 Research Limited
Year: 2019

description: Interactions among living organisms are crucial for an ecosystem. On one hand, they determine the fate of a given specie, which resources it will have access to, etc. On the other, they could be the decisive factor over extinction or persistence of that specie along the time.<br> <br>Biological interactions have been susceptible to as many approximations as methods and sciences there are. Recently, development of computational models based on cellular automaton that schematizes the functioning of immediate inter and intraspecific interactions, let scientists not just to predict many communitarian behaviors but also constitutes an important heuristic tool for many sciences.<br> <br>Recently, we have performed some experiments to prove the existence of chemical pre-germinative interactions between seeds of Chilean sclerophyllous forest (unpublished data), that could explain densodependence of some parameters in germination experiments.<br> <br>Our results show that some species are capable of expressing strong intra and interspecific interactions even from very early developmental stages, being seeds or seedlings, and in some cases demonstrating different (opposite) effects when germinated or not. For example, some seeds facilitate germination of other species, but the seedlings of the first specie, inhibit the germination of the others.<br> <br>Briefly, seeds elaborate germination and growth responses depending on: nature of the chemical message they receive from the species that surround them; if they interacted with others previously; and the developmental stage (their own stage and the stage of the individuals they interact with). All this raises doubts about whether this type of relationship responds to a stimulus-response model, to one of autopoietic nature, to one of an adaptive type, or if there are other ways to explain the complexity of the seed bank's response.<br><br>In other words, being the bank of seeds of a forest, the group of seeds that coexist in that surface, its organic response will be influenced by the diversity of species that are present there, the humidity, the climatic factors, the type of soil, etc. But there is a margin of response that cannot be explained solely by environmental factors, and that corresponds to biological interactions. Now, taking into account that these interactions will be conditioned by the state of development of both the seeds or seedlings that receive the message and the stage of the seeds that send it, and the stage of those last ones will be conditioned by the chemical messages that they have received previously, originates a real problem to explain the information flows between the constituent parts that will determine the final ecological response of the system.<br> <br>The fact that there is an ontogenetic individual memory that recognizes and processes the stimuli coming from the environment (chain of signals) and a phylogenetic one that explains the complex levels of discrimination and competition in the seed germination (identity of the species) derives the need to propose models of interaction that go beyond the unidimensional perspective. The present study proposes possible models for the understanding of self-regulated systems composed of constituents that elaborate responses based on supra-individual interactions, that is, mediated by a "community memory" that determines the information flows that sustain and give life to an ecological niche.<br> <br>We propose the Genealogy of Interactions as an alternative model to the one based on autopoiesis, to understand the complex interactions at biological community level. We have compared the most important pros and cons of both models and how they can be integrated into a general theory for interaction systems that accounts for the recursivity in the distribution of information and energy flows within a biological community.<br> <br>The importance of historical networks of collective interaction among the parts of a community is materialized in how they determine the individual choice response of each constituent. That is, the recognition of collective interactions affects the individual response of each part within the system. This has been one of the reasons for opting for a model based on the Genealogy of Interactions whose functioning can be explained by advances in the Network Theory.<br> <br>Finally, in this work we have delimited the possible implications of a model based on the Genealogy of Interactions and the Network Theory for the understanding interactions within an ecological community. In addition, this analysis has been extrapolated to the study of machines in order to put into discussion the infinite possibilities of "data pragmatics", that is, the interactional dimension within information processing and the possibilities that certain processors generate specific responses to information flows contained in networks of collective interaction. These possibilities make a disruption of the external-internal medium barrier and get inserted in a dimension where the constituents of a system can respond from a supra individual level and not necessarily from their particular conditions, which can increase their effectiveness.