Related papers: Selection for smaller brains in Holocene human evo…
We consider the evolution of a population of fixed size with no selection. The number of generations $G$ to reach the first common ancestor evolves in time. This evolution can be described by a simple Markov process which allows one to…
Natural selection drives species to develop brains, with sizes that increase with the complexity of the tasks to be tackled. Our goal is to investigate the balance between the metabolic costs of larger brains compared to the advantage they…
Models of population growth and extinction are an increasingly popular subject of study. However, consequences of stochasticity and noise in shaping distributions and outcomes are not sufficiently explored. Here we consider a distributed…
An important side effect of the evolution of the human brain is an increased capacity to form opinions in a very large domain of issues, which become points of aggressive interpersonal disputes. Remarkably, such disputes are often no less…
Using the growth of population in Australia in the past 10,000 years it is illustrated here how an illusion created by hyperbolic distributions may lead easily to incorrect conclusions. Contrary to the published claim, there was no change…
There are two contrasting explanations of sleep: as a proximate, essential physiological function or as an adaptive state of inactivity and these hypotheses remain widely debated. To investigate the adaptive significance of sleep, we…
Life systems are complex and hierarchical, with diverse components at different scales, yet they sustain themselves, grow, and evolve over time. How can a theory of such complex biological states be developed? Here we note that for a…
The human brain is composed of distinct regions that are each associated with particular functions and distinct propensities for the control of neural dynamics. However, the relation between these functions and control profiles is poorly…
Various features of the development of individual living species, including individual humans, are programmed. Is death also programmed, and if yes, how is it implemented and what can be the underlying mechanism providing the inevitability…
During the first years of life, the human brain undergoes dynamic spatially-heterogeneous changes, involving differentiation of neuronal types, dendritic arborization, axonal ingrowth, outgrowth and retraction, synaptogenesis, and…
(1) Results of analysis of new sets of anthropogenic data are presented. They confirm earlier results of similar analyses. The expected and inevitable massive deceleration of human-induced global change process is demonstrated as an ongoing…
To make informed decisions in natural environments that change over time, humans must update their beliefs as new observations are gathered. Studies exploring human inference as a dynamical process that unfolds in time have focused on…
One of the most contested questions about human behaviour is whether there are inherent sex or gender differences in the formation and maintenance of social bonds. On one hand, female and male brains are structurally almost identical, and…
Human populations have undergone dramatic changes in population size in the past 100,000 years, including a severe bottleneck of non-African populations and recent explosive population growth. There is currently great interest in how these…
Due to stochastic fluctuations arising from finite population size, known as genetic drift, the ability of a population to explore a rugged fitness landscape depends on its size. In the weak mutation regime, while the mean steady-state…
We study how environmental stochasticity influences the long-term population size in certain one- and two-species models. The difficulty is that even when one can prove that there is persistence, it is usually impossible to say anything…
Stellar-population analyses of today's galaxies show "downsizing", where the stars in more massive galaxies tend to have formed earlier and over a shorter time span. We show that this phenomenon is not necessarily "anti-hierarchical" but…
A macroscopic theory for describing cellular states during steady-growth is presented, which is based on the consistency between cellular growth and molecular replication, as well as the robustness of phenotypes against perturbations.…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
Attempting to imitate the brain functionalities, researchers have bridged between neuroscience and artificial intelligence for decades; however, experimental neuroscience has not directly advanced the field of machine learning. Here, using…