Although these results suggest that general theoretical principles might underlie biological self-organization, there is no well-founded theory yet for understanding how living systems operate near critical points in a broad range of contexts. This compels us to ask what type of mechanisms are driving biological systems at a dauntingly diverse span of levels of organization to operate near critical points of activity. During the last couple of decades, the issue has been popularized as the ‘adaptation to the edge of chaos’11 and different solutions have been tested through modelling approaches. However, as we have stated, this question is still unresolved and a general mathematical framework for understanding how living systems are driven to criticality is yet lacking.