Colloquium: Criticality and dynamical scaling in living systems

A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and, i.e. in the vicinity of the critical point of a phase transition. has been argued to provide biological systems with an optimal between robustness against perturbations and flexibility to adapt to conditions, as well as to confer on them optimal computational, huge dynamical repertoires, unparalleled sensitivity to stimuli,. Criticality, with its concomitant scale invariance, can be conjectured to in living systems as the result of adaptive and evolutionary processes, for reasons to be fully elucidated, select for it as a template upon higher layers of complexity can rest. This hypothesis is very suggestive it proposes that criticality could constitute a general and common strategy in biology stemming from the physics of phase transitions., despite its thrilling implications, this is still in its embryonic as a well-founded theory and, as such, it has elicited some healthy. From the experimental side, the advent of high-throughput has created new prospects in the exploration of biological, and empirical evidence in favor of criticality has proliferated, with ranging from endogenous brain activity and gene-expression patterns, flocks of birds and insect-colony foraging, to name but a few...