Related papers: Information and fitness
We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…
Central to the functioning of a living cell is its ability to control the readout or expression of information encoded in the genome. In many cases, a single transcription factor protein activates or represses the expression of many genes.…
Evolution is the process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments. This is expressed via the concept of fitness, defined as relative reproductive success. However, it has been pointed out that this…
We study the performance of different methods for processing information, incorporating narrative selection within an evolutionary model. All agents update their beliefs according to Bayes' Rule, but some strategically choose the narrative…
Resource competition is a fundamental interaction in natural communities.However little is known about competition in spatial environments where organisms are able to regulate resource distributions. Here, we analyze the competition of two…
Although there is always an interplay between the dynamics of information diffusion and disease spreading, the empirical research on the systemic coevolution mechanisms connecting these two spreading dynamics is still lacking. Here we…
The modelling of evolutionary game dynamics in finite populations requires microscopic processes that determine how strategies spread. The exact details of these processes are often chosen without much further consideration. Different types…
Predicting evolution of expanding populations is critical to control biological threats such as invasive species and cancer metastasis. Expansion is primarily driven by reproduction and dispersal, but nature abounds with examples of…
In order to respond to environmental signals, cells often use small molecular circuits to transmit information about their surroundings. Recently, motivated by concrete examples in signaling and gene regulation, a body of work has focused…
Information sharing between individuals is crucial to improve performance in collective tasks. However, in a competitive world, individuals may be reluctant to share information with the others, and it is still unclear how the presence of…
We consider a population spreading across a finite number of sites. Individuals can move from one site to the other according to a network (oriented links between the sites) that vary periodically over time. On each site, the population…
We demonstrate with a thought experiment that fitness-based population dynamical approaches to evolution are not able to make quantitative, falsifiable predictions about the long-term behavior of evolutionary systems. A key characteristic…
It is widely believed that the perceptual system of an organism is optimized for the properties of the environment to which it is exposed. A specific instance of this principle known as the Infomax principle holds that the purpose of early…
Organisms and algorithms learn probability distributions from previous observations, either over evolutionary time or on the fly. In the absence of regularities, estimating the underlying distribution from data would require observing each…
Macroevolution is considered as a problem of stochastic dynamics in a system with many competing agents. Evolutionary events (speciations and extinctions) are triggered by fitness records found by random exploration of the agents' fitness…
Living organisms process information to interact and adapt to their changing environment with the goal of finding food, mates or averting hazards. The structure of their niche has profound repercussions by both selecting their internal…
In the simplest view of transcriptional regulation, the expression of a gene is turned on or off by changes in the concentration of a transcription factor (TF). We use recent data on noise levels in gene expression to show that it should be…
This paper focuses on the maximum speed at which biological evolution can occur. I derive inequalities that limit the rate of evolutionary processes driven by natural selection, mutations, or genetic drift. These \emph{rate limits} link the…
Cooperators forgo their interest to benefit others. Thus cooperation should not be favored by natural selection. It challenges the evolutionists, since cooperation is widespread. As one of the resolutions, information spreading has been…
One of the fundamental problems in biology concerns the method by which a cluster of organisms can regulate the proportion of individuals that perform various roles or modes as if each individual knows a whole situation without a leader. A…