Organizational Principles of Biological Systems

How does the complex, adaptive, and autonomous organization of life emerge from the laws of physics and information? This review argues that the answer lies in a convergent set of universal organizational principles that constitute a physical and informational grammar of the living. Living sys-tems are dissipative structures that achieve organizational clo-sure—materially and energetically open, yet causally closed—thereby at-taining genuine autonomy and agency. Their architecture exhibits fractal and modular scaling laws that maximize energy flow, robustness, and evolv- ability under universal physical constraints. Critically, organisms operate at critical transitions—zones of controlled instability where fluctuations amplify information processing, transforming noise into adaptive signal. This self-organized criticality enables functional degeneracy, relational redun-dancy, and evolutionary antifragility. Cognition emerges as distributed ac-tive inference—a predictive-corrective cycle that integrates perception, ac-tion, and learning in accordance with the Free Energy Prin- ciple. From molecular networks to ecosystems, the same physico-informational gram- mars unfold recursively, revealing a deep organizational holography: the principles of organization are replicated across scales. Evolution under the Law of Increasing Functional Information is not random drift, but a direc-tional expansion of functional complexity—a thermodynamic gradient to-wards greater agency. This synthesis chal- lenges biological exceptionalism: the trajectory from thermodynamics to cognition is continuous, physically constrained, and potentially inevitable. Life does not violate physical laws—it fulfills them in regimes of high informational complexity, instan- tiating fundamental principles in self-organized architectures capable of prediction, memory, and purpose.