Related papers: Mathematical Demonstration of Darwinian Theory of …
With unprecedented advances in genetic engineering we are starting to see progressively more original examples of synthetic life. As such organisms become more common it is desirable to be able to distinguish between natural and artificial…
Darwin's hypothesis that all extant life forms are descendants of a last common ancestor cell and diversification of life forms results from gradual mutation plus natural selection represents a mainstream view that has influenced biology…
A simple model of species origin resulted from dynamic features of a population, solely, is developed. The model is based on the evolution optimality in space distribution, and the selection is gone over the mobility. Some biological issues…
Darwin's theory of evolution is considered to be one of the greatest scientific gems in modern science. It not only gives us a description of how living things evolve, but also shows how a population evolves through time and also, why only…
From 1837, when he returned to England aboard the $\textit{HMS Beagle}$, to 1860, just after publication of $\textit{The Origin of Species}$, Charles Darwin kept detailed notes of each book he read or wanted to read. His notes and…
The idea that all life on earth traces back to a common beginning dates back at least to Charles Darwin's {\em Origin of Species}. Ever since, biologists have tried to piece together parts of this `tree of life' based on what we can observe…
Although Darwinian models are rampant in the social sciences, social scientists do not face the problem that motivated Darwin's theory of natural selection: the problem of explaining how lineages evolve despite that any traits they acquire…
The problem of the rate and mechanisms of biological evolution was considered. It was shown that species could not be formed due to undirected mutations in characteristic times of about one million years. A mechanism of deterministic…
It is usually believed that Darwin's theory leads to a smooth gradual evolution, so that mass extinctions must be caused by external shocks. However, it has recently been argued that mass extinctions arise from the intrinsic dynamics of…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
Jerry Fodor argues that Darwin was wrong about "natural selection" because (1) it is only a tautology rather than a scientific law that can support counterfactuals ("If X had happened, Y would have happened") and because (2) only minds can…
Bayesian methods since the time of Laplace have been understood by their practitioners as closely aligned to the scientific method. Indeed a recent champion of Bayesian methods, E. T. Jaynes, titled his textbook on the subject Probability…
"Evidence and Evolution: the Logic behind the Science" was published in 2008 by Elliott Sober. It examines the philosophical foundations of the statistical arguments used to evaluate hypotheses in evolutionary biology, based on simple…
Darwin claims in the {\em Origin} that similarity is evidence for common ancestry, but that adaptive similarities are "almost valueless" as evidence. This claim seems reasonable for some adaptive similarities but not for others. Here we…
In the spirit of the many recent simple models of evolution inspired by statistical physics, we put forward a simple model of the evolution of such models. Like its objects of study, it is (one supposes) in principle testable and capable of…
Life forms exhibit such a degree of exquisite organization that it seems impossible that they could have developed out of a process of trial and error, as intimated by the theory of Darwinian evolution. In this general public paper I…
Instructive influence of environment on heredity has been a debated topic for centuries. Darwin's identification of natural selection coupled to chance variation as the driving force for evolution, against a formal interpretation proposed…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
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…