Related papers: Evidence and Evolution: A Review
We summarize the principles and fundamental ingredients of evolutionary synthesis models, which are stellar evolution, stellar atmospheres, the IMF, star-formation histories, nebular emission, and also attenuation from the ISM and IGM. The…
This manuscript contains nothing new, but synthesizes known results: For the theoretical population geneticist with a probabilistic background, we provide a summary of some key results on stochastic differential equations. For the…
Social norms and conventions are commonly accepted and adopted behaviors and practices within a social group that guide interactions -- e.g., how to spell a word or how to greet people -- and are central to a group's culture and identity.…
Many published research results are false, and controversy continues over the roles of replication and publication policy in improving the reliability of research. Addressing these problems is frustrated by the lack of a formal framework…
Adaptation is a central topic in theoretical biology, of practical importance for analyzing drug resistance mutations. Several authors have used arguments based on extreme value theory in their work on adaptation. There are complications…
Metabolism and evolution are closely connected: if a mutation incurs extra energetic costs for an organism, there is a baseline selective disadvantage that may or may not be compensated for by other adaptive effects. A long-standing, but to…
Testing hypotheses is an issue of primary importance in the scientific research, as well as in many other human activities. Much clarification about it can be achieved if the process of learning from data is framed in a stochastic model of…
In 1995 I wrote a paper: "A Speed Limit for Evolution" whose main result was that evolution must proceed rather slowly, in accordance with the earlier views and intuitions of many authors. The abstract of the paper said: "The genetic…
There are various approaches to the problem of how one is supposed to conduct a statistical analysis. Different analyses can lead to contradictory conclusions in some problems so this is not a satisfactory state of affairs. It seems that…
The gap in statistics between multi-variate and time-series analysis can be bridged by using entropy statistics and recent developments in multi-dimensional scaling. For explaining the evolution of the sciences as non-linear dynamics, the…
Statistical systems are conceived from the standpoint of statistical mechanics, as made of a (generally large) number of identical units and exhibiting a (generally large) number of different configurations (microstates), among which only…
The goal of Artificial Life research, as articulated by Chris Langton, is "to contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of life-as-it-could-be" (1989, p.1). The study and pursuit of…
The question of why we age is a fundamental one. It is about who we are, and it also might have critical practical aspects as we try to find ways to age slower. Or to not age at all. Different reasons point at distinct strategies for the…
A logic is defined that allows to express information about statistical probabilities and about degrees of belief in specific propositions. By interpreting the two types of probabilities in one common probability space, the semantics given…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
Statistical modeling is a powerful tool for developing and testing theories by way of causal explanation, prediction, and description. In many disciplines there is near-exclusive use of statistical modeling for causal explanation and the…
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) poses a significant challenge to existing mathematical reasoning benchmarks. However, these benchmarks tend to become easier over time as LLMs can learn from the published benchmarks.…
We defend a new theory of statistical evidence, which we call Robust Bayesianism (RB). We prove that, under widely accepted assumptions, RB entails the law of likelihood [Royall, 1997], the likelihood principle [Berger and Wolpert, 1988],…
Mathematical models play an increasingly important role in the interpretation of biological experiments. Studies often present a model that generates the observations, connecting hypothesized process to an observed pattern. Such generative…
In the article I study the evolutionary adaptivity of two simple population models, based on either altruistic or egoistic law of energy exchange. The computational experiments show the convincing advantage of the altruists, which brings us…