Related papers: Why so many sperm cells?
The emergence of agriculture is suggested to have driven extensive human population growths. However, genetic evidence from maternal mitochondrial genomes suggests major population expansions began before the emergence of agriculture.…
The search for Life in the Universe generally assumes three basic life's needs: I) building block elements (i.e., CHNOPS), II) a solvent to life's reactions (generally, liquid water) and III) a thermodynamic disequilibrium. It is assumed…
Population diversity is crucial in evolutionary algorithms to enable global exploration and to avoid poor performance due to premature convergence. This book chapter reviews runtime analyses that have shown benefits of population diversity,…
The guidance of human sperm cells under confinement in quasi 2D microchambers is investigated using a purely physical method to control their distribution. Transport property measurements and simulations are performed with dilute sperm…
Researchers have proposed that the distinction between so-called "simple" and "complex" societies can be expressed by an increase in the number of levels at which functional organization, interaction, and thus selection, operate. In spite…
Understanding the emergence and evolution of multicellularity and cellular differentiation is a core problem in biology. We develop a quantitative model that shows that a multicellular form emerges from genetically identical unicellular…
The classical "game of life" (GOL) due to Conway is a famous mathematical game constructed as a two-dimensional cellular automaton in which each cell is either alive or dead. A set of evolutionary rules determines whether a cell dies,…
Cellular signaling is essential in information processing and decision making. Therefore, a variety of experimental approaches have been developed to study signaling on bulk and single-cell level. Single-cell measurements of signaling…
We study the evolution of offspring sex ratios using a game-theoretical model in which the decision to have another child depends on the sex of the previous child. Motivated by higher male infant mortality and the tendency to try again…
Crossover and mutation are the two main operators that lead to new solutions in evolutionary approaches. In this article, a new method of performing the crossover phase is presented. The problem of choice is evolutionary decision tree…
Local perturbations of individual metabolic reactions may result in different levels of lethality, depending on their roles in metabolism and the size of subsequent cascades induced by their failure. Moreover, essentiality of individual…
This is my attempt to answer Schr\"odinger's question: "What is Life?". In living cell the local combination of atoms is reproduced with incredible accuracy. In the case of protein biosynthesis the notion of the physical aspect of the…
Eukaryotic cells maintain their inner order by a hectic process of distillation of molecular factors taking place on the surface of their lipid membranes. To understand the properties of this molecular sorting process, a physical model of…
Sex determination in the order Hymenoptera is based on arrhenotoky, hymenopteran males are usually haploid and females diploid. Males of the Ichneumonidae Diadromus pulchellus, solitary endoparasitoid of A. assectella pupae are normally…
The question of why we age is a fundamental one. It is about who we are, and it also might have critical practical aspects as we try to find ways to age slower. Or to not age at all. Different reasons point at distinct strategies for the…
Sexually reproducing populations with small number of individuals may go extinct by stochastic fluctuations in sex determination, causing all their members to become male or female in a generation. In this work we calculate the time to…
We propose an alternative to the prevailing two origin of life narratives, one based on a replicator first hypothesis, and one based on a metabolism first hypothesis. Both hypotheses have known difficulties: All known evolvable molecular…
We propose an approach of open-ended evolution via the simulation of swarm dynamics. In nature, swarms possess remarkable properties, which allow many organisms, from swarming bacteria to ants and flocking birds, to form higher-order…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event…
The number of ribosomes in a cell is considered as limiting, and gene expression is thus largely determined by their cellular concentration. In this work we develop a toy model to study the trade-off between the ribosomal supply and the…