Related papers: Viva Panspermia!
We use a probability theory framework to discuss the search for biosignatures. This perspective allows us to analyse the potential for different biosignatures to provide convincing evidence of extraterrestrial life and to formalise…
Searching for extraterrestrial life and supporting human life in space are traditionally regarded as separate challenges. However, there are significant benefits to an approach that treats them as different aspects of the same essential…
The current understanding of supernova and gamma-ray burst events suggests important effects on the biosphere if one of more of them happened to strike the earth in the past. In this paper we evaluate the possibility that life extinctions…
The recent discovery of potentially habitable exoplanets around Proxima Centauri and TRAPPIST-1 has attracted much attention due to their potential for hosting life. We delineate a simple model that accurately describes the evolution of…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
Life on Earth has experienced numerous upheavals over its approximately 4 billion year history. In previous work we have discussed how interruptions to stability lead, on average, to increases in habitability over time, a tendency we called…
Growth of the world population and the world economic growth were hyperbolic in the past 2,000,000 years. Recently, from around 1950, they started to be diverted to slower trajectories but they are still close to the historical hyperbolic…
Would another origin of life resemble Earth's biochemical use of amino acids? Here we review current knowledge at three levels: 1) Could other classes of chemical structure serve as building blocks for biopolymer structure and catalysis?…
Dennis Sciama argued that the existence of life depended on many quantities, the fundamental constants, so in a random universe life should be highly unlikely. However, without full knowledge of these constants, his argument implies a…
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…
The factors contributing to the persistence and stability of life are fundamental for understanding complex living systems. Organisms are commonly challenged by harsh and fluctuating environments that are suboptimal for growth and…
The origin and early evolution of eukaryotes are one of the major transitions in the evolution of life on earth. One of its most interesting aspects is the emergence of cellular organelles, their dynamics, their functions, and their…
In this paper we review and extend our earlier recent work on thermostated systems. A description of nano-biological systems by Markov chains in coordinate space in the strongly overdamped limit is presented. Characterization of the most…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…
We consider the dynamics imposed by natural selection on the populations of two competing, sexually reproducing, haploid species. In this setting, the fitness of any genome varies over time due to the changing population mix of the…
A phenomenological theory of growth of the population of humankind is proposed. The theory based on the assumption about a multifractal nature of the set of number of people in temporal axis and contains control parameters. In particular…
Gynandromorphs are creatures where at least two different body sections are a different sex. Bilateral gynandromorphs are half male and half female. Here we develop a theory of gynandromorph ontogeny based on developmental control networks.…
Exploring the Universe is one of the great unifying themes of humanity. Part of this endeavour is the search for extraterrestrial life. But how likely is it that we will find life, or that if we do it will be similar to ourselves? And…
It has been a puzzling question why some organisms reproduce sexually. Fisher and Muller hypothesized that reproducing by sex can speed up the evolution. They explained that in the sexual reproduction, recombination can combine beneficial…
The sexual version of the Penna model of biological ageing, simulated since 1996, is compared here with alternative forms of reproduction as well as with models not involving ageing. In particular we want to check how sexual forms of life…