Related papers: SETI in vivo: testing the we-are-them hypothesis
The evolution of symbolic communication is a longstanding open research question in biology. While some theories suggest that it originated from sub-symbolic communication (i.e., iconic or indexical), little experimental evidence exists on…
Land-based beacons, information laden probes sent into our solar system, and more distal communication nodes have each been proposed as the most likely means by which we might be contacted by ET. Each method, considered in isolation from…
A common goal in modern biostatistics is to form a biomarker signature from high dimensional gene expression data that is predictive of some outcome of interest. After learning this biomarker signature, an important question to answer is…
Combining a spatiotemporal, multi-agent based model of a foraging ecosystem with linear, genetically programmed rules for the agents' behaviors results in implicit, endogenous, objective functions and selection algorithms based on "natural…
The probability that life spontaneously emerges in a suitable environment (abiogenesis) is one of the major unknowns in astrobiology. Assessing its value is impeded by the lack of an accepted theory for the origin of life, and is further…
Traditional searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) or "technosignatures" focus on dedicated observations of single stars or regions in the sky to detect excess or transient emission from intelligent sources. The newest generation…
As artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities advance rapidly, frontier models increasingly demonstrate systematic deception and scheming, complying with safety protocols during oversight but defecting when unsupervised. This paper examines…
Testing whether a probability distribution is compatible with a given Bayesian network is a fundamental task in the field of causal inference, where Bayesian networks model causal relations. Here we consider the class of causal structures…
Symbolic regression is the process of identifying mathematical expressions that fit observed output from a black-box process. It is a discrete optimization problem generally believed to be NP-hard. Prior approaches to solving the problem…
The design of genetic networks with specific functions is one of the major goals of synthetic biology. However, constructing biological devices that work "as required" remains challenging, while the cost of uncovering flawed designs…
In ecology it has become common to apply DNA barcoding to biological samples leading to datasets containing a large number of nucleotide sequences. The focus is then on inferring the taxonomic placement of each of these sequences by…
In the near future, all the human genes will be identified. But understanding the functions coded in the genes is a much harder problem. For example, by using block entropy, one has that the DNA code is closer to a random code then written…
Living organisms are the most complex, interesting and significant objects regarding all substructures of the universe. Life science is regarded as a science of the 21st century and one can expect great new discoveries in the near futures.…
Since its inception six decades ago, astrobiology has diversified immensely to encompass several scientific questions including the origin and evolution of Terran life, the organic chemical composition of extraterrestrial objects, and the…
The search for life in the Solar System hinges on data from planetary missions. Detecting biosignatures based on molecular identity, isotopic composition, or chiral excess requires measurements that current and planned missions can only…
We demonstrate that the assembly pathway method underlying assembly theory (AT) is an encoding scheme widely used by popular statistical compression algorithms. We show that in all cases (synthetic or natural) AT performs similarly to other…
Statistical hypothesis testing serves as statistical evidence for scientific innovation. However, if the reported results are intentionally biased, hypothesis testing no longer controls the rate of false discovery. In particular, we study…
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a…
Why is the genetic code the way it is? The most successful theory states that the codon assignments minimise the effects of errors arising in primordial living systems. Here a transversion is reported that leaves invariant degeneracy in the…
The genetic code is profoundly shaped by an origin in ancient RNA-mediated interactions, needing an extended development to reach the Standard Genetic Code (SGC). That development can serially use RNA specificities, a ribonucleopeptide…