Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Johnson S
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5465891 | biostudies-literature | 2017 May
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Johnson Samuel S Jones Nick S NS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20170516 22
Many natural, complex systems are remarkably stable thanks to an absence of feedback acting on their elements. When described as networks these exhibit few or no cycles, and associated matrices have small leading eigenvalues. It has been suggested that this architecture can confer advantages to the system as a whole, such as "qualitative stability," but this observation does not in itself explain how a loopless structure might arise. We show here that the number of feedback loops in a network, a ...[more]