Related papers: An Illustrated Introduction to the Basic Biologica…
Genetic redundancy is ubiquitous and can be found in any organism. However, it has been argued that genetic redundancy reduces total population fitness, and therefore, redundancy is unlikely to evolve. In this letter, we study an…
Self-organization is the autonomous assembly of a network of interacting components into a stable, organized pattern. This article shows that the process of self-assembly can be encoded in terms of evolutionary entropy, a statistical…
Textual analysis of typical microbial genomes reveals that they have the statistical characteristics of a DNA sequence of a much shorter length. This peculiar property supports an evolutionary model in which a genome evolves by random…
A conflict exists between field biologists and physiologists ("functional biologists" or "evolutionary ecologists") on the one hand and those working in molecular evolution ("evolutionary biologists" or "population geneticists") on the…
An equation describing the evolution of phenotypic distribution is derived using methods developed in statistical physics. The equation is solved by using the singular perturbation method, and assuming that the number of bases in the…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
The genetic code is profoundly shaped by an origin in ancient RNA-mediated interactions, needing an extended development to reach the Standard Genetic Code (SGC). That development can serially use RNA specificities, a ribonucleopeptide…
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
In the theoretical biology framework one fundamental problem is the so-called error catastrophe in Darwinian evolution models. We reexamine Eigen's fundamental equations by mapping them into a polymer depinning transition problem in a…
The two most fundamental processes describing change in biology, development and evolu-tion, occur over drastically different timescales, difficult to reconcile within a unified framework. Development involves temporal sequences of cell…
The origin of life is often framed primarily as a chemical problem, yet life's defining feature is evolution. Advances in geochemistry, prebiotic chemistry, and molecular biology have produced diverse scenarios for the emergence of genomes,…
Fitness landscapes are mappings between genotypes, phenotypes, and fitness that shape evolution. In recent years, empirical work and theoretical models have greatly advanced our understanding of how populations navigate rugged fitness…
This paper shows that differentiating the lifetimes of two phenotypes independently from their fertility can lead to a qualitative change in the equilibrium of a population: since survival and reproduction are distinct functional aspects of…
Phenotypic evolution implies sequential fixations of new genomic sequences. The speed at which these mutations fixate depends, in part, on the relative fitness (selection coefficient) of the mutant vs. the ancestor. Using a simple…
Evolution by Natural Selection is a process by which progeny inherit some properties from their progenitors with small variation. These properties are subject to Natural Selection and are called adaptive traits and carriers of the latter…
The classification of life should be based upon the fundamental mechanism in the evolution of life. We found that the global relationships among species should be circular phylogeny, which is quite different from the common sense based upon…
As Nature's version of machine learning, evolution has solved many extraordinarily complex problems, none perhaps more remarkable than learning to harness an increase in chemical entropy (disorder) to generate directed chemical forces…
In general, cellular phenotypes, as measured by concentrations of cellular components, involve large degrees of freedom. However, recent measurement has demonstrated that phenotypic changes resulting from adaptation and evolution in…
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection does not predict long-term progress or advancement, nor does it provide a useful way to define or understand these concepts. Nevertheless, the history of life is marked by major trends that…