Related papers: Wright's adaptive landscape versus Fisher's fundam…
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…
An elementary biostatistical theory based on a selectivity-variability principle is proposed to address a question raised by Charles Darwin, namely, how one sex of a sexually dimorphic species might tend to evolve with greater variability…
Well known biological approximations are universal, i.e. invariant to transformations from one species to another. With no other experimental data, such invariance yields exact conservation (with respect to biological diversity and…
The main topic of this thesis is the analysis of evolution equations reflecting issues in ecology and population dynamics. In mathematical modelling, the impact of environmental elements and the interaction between species is read into the…
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…
First proposed as an empirical rule over half a century ago, the Richards growth equation has been frequently invoked in population modeling and pandemic forecasting. Central to this model is the advent of a fractional exponent $\gamma$,…
Background: Speciation corresponds to the progressive establishment of reproductive barriers between groups of individuals derived from an ancestral stock. Since Darwin did not believe that reproductive barriers could be selected for, he…
To model discrete sequences such as DNA, proteins, and language using diffusion, practitioners must choose between three major methods: diffusion in discrete space, Gaussian diffusion in Euclidean space, or diffusion on the simplex. Despite…
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection does not predict long-term progress or advancement, nor does it provide a useful way to define or understand these concepts. Nevertheless, the history of life is marked by major trends that…
The advent of modern genome sequencing techniques allows for a more stringent test of the neutrality hypothesis of Darwinian evolution, where all individuals have the same fitness. Using the individual based model of Wright and Fisher, we…
Skeptics of biological evolution often claim that evolution requires a decrease in entropy, giving rise to a conflict with the second law of thermodynamics. This argument is fallacious because it neglects the large increase in entropy…
We introduce a multi-allele Wright-Fisher model with non-recurrent, reversible mutation and directional selection. In this setting, the allele frequencies at a single locus track the path of a hybrid jump-diffusion process with state space…
Heritability is a central concept in the long-standing debate about nature versus nurture in biological and social sciences. However, existing notions of heritability are based on strong assumptions and do not use explicit causal models. We…
We establish an analogy between the Fokker-Planck equation describing evolutionary landscape dynamics and the Schr\"{o}dinger equation which characterizes quantum mechanical particles, showing how a population with multiple genetic traits…
In the classic view introduced by R. A. Fisher, a quantitative trait is encoded by many loci with small, additive effects. Recent advances in QTL mapping have begun to elucidate the genetic architectures underlying vast numbers of…
In this paper, we inspect well-known population genetics and social dynamics models. In these models, interacting individuals, while participating in a self-organizing process, give rise to the emergence of complex behaviors and patterns.…
Quantifying the adaptive landscape in a given dynamical processes has been one of most important goals in theoretical biology. It can have immediate implications for many dynamical properties, such as robustness and plasticity. Based on…
As artificial intelligence systems (AIs) become increasingly produced by recursive self-improvement, a form of evolution may emerge, with the traits of AI systems shaped by the success of earlier AIs in designing and propagating their…
Languages and genes are both transmitted from generation to generation, with opportunity for differential reproduction and survivorship of forms. Here we apply a rigorous inference framework, drawn from population genetics, to distinguish…
Based on the normal distribution and its properties, i.e., average and variance, Fisher works have provided a conceptual framework to identify genotype-phenotype associations. While Fisher intuition has proved fruitful over the past…