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Mammalian brains span about 4 orders of magnitude in cortical volume and have to operate in different environments that require diverse behavioral skills. Despite these geometric and behavioral diversities, the examination of cerebral…

Artificial and biological systems may evolve similar computational solutions despite fundamental differences in architecture and learning mechanisms -- a form of convergent evolution. We demonstrate this phenomenon through large-scale…

Why is the spine of a neuron so small that only small numbers of molecules can exist and reactions inevitably become stochastic? Despite such noisy conditions, we previously showed that the spine exhibits robust, sensitive and efficient…

Standard neutral population genetics theory with a strictly fixed population size has important limitations. An alternative model that allows independently fluctuating population sizes and reproduces the standard neutral evolution is…

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…

The human brain achieves its remarkable computational prowess not despite its inherent non-ideal factors noise, heterogeneity, structural irregularities, decentralized plasticity, systematic errors, and chaotic dynamics but precisely…

The evolution of cognition is frequently discussed as the evolution of cognitive abilities or the evolution of some neuronal structures in the brain. However, since such traits or abilities are often highly complex, understanding their…

Human populations have experienced dramatic growth since the Neolithic revolution. Recent studies that sequenced a very large number of individuals observed an extreme excess of rare variants, and provided clear evidence of recent rapid…

The study of brain morphology changes in normal individuals may capture aspects of functionally-relevant brain aging not fully indicated by gross volumetry. Despite the important role of subcortical brain structures in cognition, the…

Genome sizes have evolved to vary widely, from 250 bases in viroids to 670 billion bases in amoeba. This remarkable variation in genome size is the outcome of complex interactions between various evolutionary factors such as point mutation…

Darwin introduced the concept of the "living fossil" to describe species belonging to lineages that have experienced little evolutionary change, and suggested that species in more slowly evolving lineages are more prone to extinction (1).…

For long it has been known that specific patterns of folding are necessary for an optimally functioning brain. For instance, lissencephaly and polymicrogyria can lead to severe mental retardation, short life expectancy, epileptic seizures,…

The goal of the Human Brain Project is to develop during the next decade an infrastructure necessary for running a simulation of the entire human brain constrained by current experimental data. One of the key issues is therefore to…

Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on…

We analyse numerically the effects of small population size in the initial transient regime of a simple example population dynamics. These effects play an important role for the numerical determination of large deviation functions of…

Structural connectivity in the brain is typically studied by reducing its observation to a single spatial resolution. However, the brain possesses a rich architecture organized over multiple scales linked to one another. We explored the…

The human brain's computational prowess emerges not despite but because of its inherent "non-ideal factors"-noise, heterogeneity, structural irregularities, decentralized plasticity, systemic errors, and chaotic dynamics-challenging…

We consider neutral evolution of a large population subject to changes in its population size. For a population with a time-variable carrying capacity we have computed the distributions of the total branch lengths of its sample genealogies.…

Background: Recent experimental and theoretical studies have shown that small asexual populations evolving on complex fitness landscapes may achieve a higher fitness than large ones due to the increased heterogeneity of adaptive…

Evolutionary search is well suited for large-scale biophysical brain modeling, where many parameters with nonlinear interactions and no tractable gradients need to be optimized. Standard evolutionary approaches achieve an excellent fit to…