Related papers: Life is physics: evolution as a collective phenome…
Understanding how genotypes map onto phenotypes, fitness, and eventually organisms is arguably the next major missing piece in a fully predictive theory of evolution. We refer to this generally as the problem of the genotype-phenotype map.…
We investigate the profound relation between the equations of biological evolution and quantum mechanics by writing a biologically inspired equation for the stochastic dynamics of an ensemble of particles. Interesting behavior is observed…
The grand challenges in biology today are being shaped by powerful high-throughput technologies that have revealed the genomes of many organisms, global expression patterns of genes and detailed information about variation within…
Neural codes appear efficient. Naturally, neuroscientists contend that an efficient process is responsible for generating efficient codes. They argue that natural selection is the efficient process that generates those codes. Although…
Population genetics lies at the heart of evolutionary theory. This topic forms part of many biological science curricula but is rarely taught to physics students. Since physicists are becoming increasingly interested in biological…
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…
Recent research has extended methods from the fields of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics into other disciplines. Most notably, one recent work creates a unified theoretical framework to understand evolutionary biology, machine…
We combine momentum from machine learning with evolutionary dynamics, where momentum can be viewed as a simple mechanism of intergenerational memory. Using information divergences as Lyapunov functions, we show that momentum accelerates the…
If evolution can be connected to the principle of least action, and if it is depicted in evolution space versus time then it corresponds to the direction of ultimate causation. As an organism evolves and follows a path of proximate…
Many systems involve numerous interacting parts and the whole system can have properties that the individual parts do not. I take this novelty as the defining characteristic of an emergent property. Other characteristics associated with…
Modeling the spontaneous evolution of morphology in natural systems and its preservation by proportionate growth remains a major scientific challenge. Yet, it is conceivable that if the basic mechanisms of growth and the coupled kinetic…
This article aims to introduce the broad field of soft active matter physics and its relevance to the life sciences in simple, accessible language. Although this area of research is relatively new, it has already demonstrated significant…
The equations of evolutionary change by natural selection are commonly expressed in statistical terms. Fisher's fundamental theorem emphasizes the variance in fitness. Quantitative genetics expresses selection with covariances and…
The evolutionary biology of aging is fundamental to understanding the mechanisms of aging and how to develop anti-aging treatments. Thus far most evolutionary theory concerns the genetics of aging with limited physiological integration.…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…
The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
We discovered a dynamic phase transition induced by sexual reproduction. The dynamics is a pure Darwinian rule with both fundamental ingredients to drive evolution: 1) random mutations and crossings which act in the sense of increasing the…
Sexual reproduction presents significant challenges to formal treatment of evolutionary processes. A starting point for systematic treatments of ecological and evolutionary phenomena has been provided by the gene centered view of evolution…
The natural evolution of life seems to proceed through steps characterized by phases of relatively rapid changes, followed by longer, more stable periods. In the light of the string-theory derived physical scenario proposed in [1], we…