Related papers: The K-Pg event as a key to bat evolution
Evolution in changing environments is an important, but little studied aspect of the theory of evolution. The idea of adaptive walks in fitness landscapes has triggered a vast amount of research and has led to many important insights about…
We present HZ_evolution, a Python package to characterize the habitable histories of exoplanets. Given inputs of a planet's current effective flux and host star properties, HZ_evolution calculates its instellation history, the evolution of…
Most of the DNA that composes a complex organism is non-coding and defined as junk. Even the coding part is composed of genes that affect the phenotype differently. Therefore, a random mutation has an effect on the specimen fitness that…
A hard difficulty in Astrobiology is the precise definition of what life is. All living beings have a cellular structure, so it is not possible to have a broader concept of life hence the search for extraterrestrial life is restricted to…
Several groups have recently suggested that small planets orbiting very closely around white dwarf stars could be promising locations for life to arise, even after stellar death. There are still many uncertainties, however, regarding the…
Ecolab and Webworld are both models of evolution produced by adding evolution to ecological equations. They differ primarily in the form of the ecological equations. Both models are self-organised to a state where extinctions balance…
When we are fortunate enough to view an exoplanetary system nearly edge-on, the star and planet periodically eclipse each other. Observations of eclipses (transits and occultations) provide a bonanza of information that cannot be obtained…
Despite tremendous interest in the topic and decades of research, the origins of the major losses of biodiversity in the history of life on Earth remain elusive. A variety of possible causes for these mass-extinction events have been…
We recommend an intensive effort to survey and understand the obliquity distribution of small close-in extrasolar planets over the coming decade. The orbital obliquities of exoplanets--i.e., the relative orientation between the planetary…
Despite great advances in our understanding of the formation of the Solar System, the evolution of the Earth, and the chemical basis for life, we are not much closer than the ancient Greeks to an answer of whether life has arisen and…
Demographic data and recent experiments verify earlier predictions that mortality has short (few percent of the life span) memory of the previous life history, may be significantly decreased, reset to its value at a much younger age, and…
Transposons are small, self-replicating DNA sequences found in every branch of life. Often, one transposon will parasitize another, forming a tiny intracellular ecosystem. In some species these ecosystems thrive, while in others they go…
The emergence of artificial intelligence has incited a paradigm shift across the spectrum of human endeavors, with ChatGPT serving as a catalyst for the transformation of various established domains, including but not limited to education,…
Expansion of the neocortex is a hallmark of human evolution. However, it remains an open question what adaptive mechanisms facilitated its expansion. Here we show, using gyrencephaly index (GI) and other physiological and life-history data…
Rapid anthropogenic environmental changes, including those due to habitat contamination, degradation, and climate change, have far-reaching effects on biological systems that may outpace animals' adaptive responses (Radchuk et al., 2019).…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. Reproduction depends on the payoff a strategy receives. The payoff depends on the environment that may change over time, on intrinsic uncertainties, and on other sources of…
The Sapient Paradox is the apparently unexplainable time delay of several ten thousand years following the arrival of Homo sapiens in Asia and Europe and before the introduction of impressive innovations with the agricultural revolution.…
Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, due to the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object…
We have developed a characterization of the geological evolution of the Earths atmosphere and surface in order to model the observable spectra of an Earth-like planet through its geological history. These calculations are designed to guide…
We suggest to simulate evolution of complex organisms constrained by the sole requirement of robustness in their expression patterns. This scenario is illustrated by evolving discrete logical networks with epigenetic properties. Evidence…