Related papers: Information -sharing, adaptive epigenetics and hum…
Biologists measure information in different ways. Neurobiologists and researchers in bioinformatics often measure information using information-theoretic measures such as Shannon's entropy or mutual information. Behavioral biologists 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.…
We consider a model for a population in a heterogeneous environment, with logistic type local population dynamics, under the assumption that individuals can switch between two different nonzero rates of diffusion. Such switching behavior…
There is little doubt in scientific circles that--counting from the origin of life towards today--evolution has led to an increase in the amount of information stored within the genomes of the biosphere. This trend of increasing information…
Life on earth is distinguished by long-lived correlations in time. The patterns of material organization that characterize living organisms today are contingent on events that occurred billions of years ago. This contingency is a necessary…
A sequential decision-making agent balances between exploring to gain new knowledge about an environment and exploiting current knowledge to maximize immediate reward. For environments studied in the traditional literature, optimal…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
Despite the obvious advantage of simple life forms capable of fast replication, different levels of cognitive complexity have been achieved by living systems in terms of their potential to cope with environmental uncertainty. Against the…
Many mathematical models of evolution assume that all individuals experience the same environment. Here, we study the Moran process in heterogeneous environments. The population is of finite size with two competing types, which are exposed…
An adaptive agent predicting the future state of an environment must weigh trust in new observations against prior experiences. In this light, we propose a view of the adaptive immune system as a dynamic Bayesian machinery that updates its…
The paper discusses a connection between asymmetric reproduction -- that is reproduction in a parent-child relationship where the parent does not mutate during reproduction --, the fact that all non-viral lifeforms bear genes of their…
One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…
The ability of organisms to accurately sense their environment and respond accordingly is critical for evolutionary success. However, exactly how the sensory ability influences fitness is a topic of active research, while the necessity of a…
Adaptation in a fluctuating environment is a process of fueling environmental information to gain fitness. Living systems have gradually developed strategies for adaptation from random and passive diversification of the phenotype to more…
Information is increasingly being viewed as a resource used by organisms to increase their fitness. Indeed, it has been formally shown that there is a sensible way to assign a reproductive value to information and it is non-negative.…
The evolutionary origins of ageing and age-associated diseases continue to pose a fundamental question in biology. This study is concerned with a recently proposed framework, which conceptualises development and ageing as a continuous…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…
Organisms have evolved immune systems that can counter pathogenic threats. The adaptive immune system in vertebrates consists of a diverse repertoire of immune receptors that can dynamically reorganize to specifically target the…
Any organism is embedded in an environment that changes over time. The timescale for and statistics of environmental change, the precision with which the organism can detect its environment, and the costs and benefits of particular protein…