Related papers: Information -sharing, adaptive epigenetics and hum…
Future health ecosystems demand the integration of emerging data technology with an increased focus on preventive medicine. Cybernetics extracts the full potential of data to serve the spectrum of health care, from acute to chronic…
Essential to each other, growth and exploration are jointly observed in populations, be it alive such as animals and cells or inanimate such as goods and money. But their ability to move, crucial to cope with uncertainty and optimize…
The analysis of the demographic transition of the past century and a half, using both empirical data and mathematical models, has rendered a wealth of well-established facts, including the dramatic increases in life expectancy. Despite…
This paper discusses the relevance of information overload for explaining environmental degradation. Our argument goes that information overload and detachment from nature, caused by energy abundance, have made individuals unaware of the…
The dynamics of populations is rich, taking into account that both, the individual's actions and the population's fitness are coupled. The way in which an individual chooses a strategy depends off course on the interaction with other…
Organisms that grow and survive in uncertain environments may need to change their physiological state as the environment changes. When the environment is uncertain, one strategy known as bet-hedging is to make these changes randomly and…
Biological and living systems process information across spatiotemporal scales, exhibiting the hallmark ability to constantly modulate their behavior to ever-changing and complex environments. In the presence of repeated stimuli, a…
Range expansion and range shifts are crucial population responses to climate change. Genetic consequences are not well understood but are clearly coupled to ecological dynamics that, in turn, are driven by shifting climate conditions. We…
Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…
The provision of intergenerational care, via the Grandmother Hypothesis, has been implicated in the evolution of post-fertile longevity, particularly in humans. However, if grandmothering does provide fitness benefits, a key question is why…
A major obstacle in analyzing the evolution of information exchange and processing is our insufficient understanding of the underlying signaling and decision-making biological mechanisms. For instance, it is unclear why are humans unique in…
Life-expectancy is a complex outcome driven by genetic, socio-demographic, environmental and geographic factors. Increasing socio-economic and health disparities in the United States are propagating the longevity-gap, making it a cause for…
We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organisation, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: (a) living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by…
Phenotypic evolution implies sequential fixations of new genomic sequences. The speed at which these mutations fixate depends, in part, on the relative fitness (selection coefficient) of the mutant vs. the ancestor. Using a simple…
More often than not, bad decisions are bad regardless of where and when they are made. Information sharing might thus be utilized to mitigate them. Here we show that sharing the information about strategy choice between players residing on…
Background: Acceleration of adaptation dynamics by stress-induced hypermutation has been found experimentally. Evolved evolvability is a prominent explanation. We investigate a more generally applicable explanation by a physical constraint.…
To survive in dynamic and uncertain environments, individuals must develop effective decision strategies that balance information gathering and decision commitment. Models of such strategies often prioritize either optimizing tangible…
A tumor can be thought of as an ecosystem, which critically means that we cannot just consider it as a collection of mutated cells but more as a complex system of many interacting cellular and microenvironmental elements. At its simplest, a…
In order to understand the phenomenon of longevity in biological world, the relationship between the potential of longevity and the structural complexity of an organism is analyzed. I. The potential of longevity is the maximum lifespan of…
Recent observations of beating signals in the excitation energy transfer dynamics of photosynthetic complexes have been interpreted as evidence for sustained coherences that are sufficiently long-lived for energy transport and coherence to…