Related papers: Why so many sperm cells?
Sperm swimming at low Reynolds number have strong hydrodynamic interactions when their concentration is high in vivo or near substrates in vitro. The beating tails not only propel the sperm through a fluid, but also create flow fields…
The emergence of multicellularity and developmental programs are among the major problems of evolutionary biology. Traditionally, research in this area has been based on the combination of data analysis and experimental work on one hand and…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
The biological requirements for an ecosystem to develop and maintain species diversity are in general unknown. Here we consider a model ecosystem of sessile and mutually excluding organisms competing for space [Mathiesen et al. Phys. Rev.…
The probability of the survival of the population of individuals of both sexes of given mature age, procreation rate and structure stability has been searched in the numerical experiment. The populations with long period of reproduction and…
The prediction that (due to the limited amount of hydrogen available as fuel in the Sun) the future duration of our favourable terrestrial environment will be short (compared with the present age of the Earth) has been interpreted as…
Evolutionary multitasking has recently emerged as a novel paradigm that enables the similarities and/or latent complementarities (if present) between distinct optimization tasks to be exploited in an autonomous manner simply by solving them…
The controversy concerning both the definition of the species and methods for inferring the boundaries and numbers of species has occupied biologists for centuries, and the debate itself has become known as the species problem. The modern…
Rapid advance of experimental techniques provides an unprecedented in-depth view into complex developmental processes. Still, little is known on how the complexity of multicellular organisms evolved by elaborating developmental programs and…
According to the "hard-steps" model, the origin of humanity required "successful passage through a number of intermediate steps" (so-called "hard" or "critical" steps) that were intrinsically improbable with respect to the total time…
We study the emergence of cell differentiation under the assumption of the existence of a given number of tradeoffs between genes encoding different functions. In the model the viability of colonies is determined by the capability of their…
Sperm motility is a prerequisite for male fertility. Enhancing the concentration of motile sperms in assisted reproductive technologies - for human and animal reproduction - is typically achieved through aggressive methods such as…
We study an evolutionary spatial prisoner's dilemma game where the fitness of the players is determined by both the payoffs from the current interaction and their history. We consider the situation where the selection timescale is slower…
It is argued that selection criteria usually referred to as "anthropic conditions" for the existence of intelligent (typical) observers widely adopted in cosmology amount only to preconditions for primitive life. The existence of life does…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
Morphogenesis of complex body shapes is reproducible despite the noise inherent in the underlying morphogenetic processes. However, how these morphogenetic processes work together to achieve this reproducibility remains unclear. Here, we…
Inside every living cell is the cytoplasm: a fluid mixture of thousands of different macromolecules, predominantly proteins. This mixture is where most of the biochemistry occurs that enables living cells to function, and it is perhaps the…
Life forms exhibit such a degree of exquisite organization that it seems impossible that they could have developed out of a process of trial and error, as intimated by the theory of Darwinian evolution. In this general public paper I…
A two-type two-sex branching process is introduced with the aim of describing the interaction of predator and prey populations with sexual reproduction and promiscuous mating. In each generation and in each species the total number of…
Tens of millions of women suffer from infertility worldwide each year. In vitro fertilization (IVF) is the best choice for many such patients. However, IVF is expensive, time-consuming, and both physically and emotionally demanding. The…