Study observes that similarities between physical and biological systems might be greater than we think

Amazing stuff! But is it science or simulations? This is dated research.

At some point during simplification/abstracting everything may look similar or like an artifact. A very possible and real risk.

"... This is the finding of a study published in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, JSTAT, conducted by an international team that includes the collaboration of MIT in Boston and CNRS in France. The study, based on the physics of materials, simulated the conditions that cause a sudden shift from a disordered state to a coordinated one in "self-propelled agents" (like biological ones). ...
in the field of collective movement studies, it has been assumed that there is a qualitative difference between particles (atoms and molecules) and biological elements (cells, but also entire organisms in groups). It was especially believed that the transition from one type of movement to another (for example, from chaos to an orderly flow, known as a phase transition) was completely different.

The crucial difference for physicists in this case has to do with the concept of distance. Particles moving in a space with many other particles influence each other primarily based on their mutual distance. For biological elements, however, the absolute distance is less important. ...

"Not the simplest possible, but the one that removes all complexity that is not relevant to the problem. In the specific case of our study, this means that the difference that is real and exist - between physical distance and topological relationship - does not alter the nature of the transition to collective motion." ..."

From the abstract:

"The nature of the transition to collective motion in assemblies of aligning self-propelled particles remains a long-standing matter of debate. In this article, we focus on dry active matter and show that weak fluctuations suffice to generically turn second-order mean-field transitions into a 'discontinuous' coexistence scenario. Our theory shows how fluctuations induce a density-dependence of the polar-field mass, even when this effect is absent at mean-field level. In turn, this dependency on density triggers a feedback loop between ordering and advection that ultimately leads to an inhomogeneous transition to collective motion and the emergence of inhomogeneous travelling bands. Importantly, we show that such a fluctuation-induced first order transition is present in both metric models, in which particles align with neighbors within a finite distance, and in 'topological' ones, in which alignment is based on more complex constructions of neighbor sets. We compute analytically the noise-induced renormalization of the polar-field mass using stochastic calculus, which we further back up by a one-loop field-theoretical analysis. Finally, we confirm our analytical predictions by numerical simulations of fluctuating hydrodynamics as well as of topological particle models with either k-nearest neighbors or Voronoi alignment."

Study observes that similarities between physical and biological systems might be greater than we think

Fluctuation-induced first order transition to collective motion (no public access)

Fluctuation-Induced First Order Transition to Collective Motion (pre-print, open access)

Fluctuation-Induced First-Order Transition to Collective Motion (something similar was already published or presented by what appears to be largely the same authors in March 2022)