The small-world phenomenon, the principle that we are all linked by a short chain of intermediate acquaintances, has been investigated in mathematics and social sciences. It has been shown to be pervasive both in nature and in engineering systems like the World Wide Web. Work of Jon Kleinberg has shown that people, using only local information, are very effective at finding short paths in a network of social contacts. In this paper we argue that the underlying key to finding short paths is scale invariance. In order to appreciate scale invariance we suggest a continuum setting, since true scale invariance happens at all scales, something which cannot be observed in a discrete model. We introduce a random-connection model that is related to continuum percolation, and we prove the existence of a unique scale-free model, among a large class of models, that allows the construction, with high probability, of short paths between pairs of points separated by any distance.

In this article, we present a self-contained review of recent work on complex biological systems which exhibit no characteristic scale. This property can manifest itself with fractals (spatial scale invariance), flicker noise or 1/f-noise where f denotes the frequency of a signal (temporal scale invariance) and power laws (scale invariance in the size and duration of events in the dynamics of the system). A hypothesis recently put forward to explain these scale-free phenomomena is criticality, a notion introduced by physicists while studying phase transitions in materials, where systems spontaneously arrange themselves in an unstable manner similar, for instance, to a row of dominoes. Here, we review in a critical manner work which investigates to what extent this idea can be generalized to biology. More precisely, we start with a brief introduction to the concepts of absence of characteristic scale (power-law distributions, fractals and 1/f- noise) and of critical phenomena. We then review typical mathematical models exhibiting such properties: edge of chaos, cellular automata and self-organized critical models. These notions are then brought together to see to what extent they can account for the scale invariance observed in ecology, evolution of species, type III epidemics and some aspects of the central nervous system. This article also discusses how the notion of scale invariance can give important insights into the workings of biological systems.