Related papers: Towards physical principles of biological evolutio…
Molecular phenotypes are important links between genomic information and organismic functions, fitness, and evolution. Complex phenotypes, which are also called quantitative traits, often depend on multiple genomic loci. Their evolution…
Biological systems are generally complicated and/or complex. In the former approach, one sets up a model with a large number of parameters to describe the system in detail. The latter approach focuses on understanding the universal aspects…
The concept of evolutionary development of structures constituted a \emph{real} revolution in biology: it was possible to understand how the very complex structures of life can arise in an out-of-equilibrium system. The investigation of…
Competitive exclusion, a key principle of ecology, can be generalized to understand many other complex systems. Individuals under surviving pressure tend to be different from others, and correlations among them change correspondingly to the…
Biological systems, unlike physical or chemical systems, are characterized by the very inhomogeneous distribution of their components. The immune system, in particular, is notable for self-organizing its structure. Classically, the dynamics…
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…
We discuss a simple model of co-evolution. In order to emphasise the effect of interaction between individuals the entire population is subjected to the same physical environment. Species are emergent structures and extinction, origination…
The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
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…
At any moment in time, evolution is faced with a formidable challenge: refining the already highly optimised design of biological species, a feat accomplished through all preceding generations. In such a scenario, the impact of random…
We examine the evolution of expression patterns and the organization of genetic information in populations of self-replicating digital organisms. Seeding the experiments with a linearly expressed ancestor, we witness the development of…
Evolutionary game theory has been successfully used to investigate the dynamics of systems, in which many entities have competitive interactions. From a physics point of view, it is interesting to study conditions under which a coordination…
We analyze the population dynamics of a broad class of fitness functions that exhibit epochal evolution---a dynamical behavior, commonly observed in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes, in which long periods of stasis in an…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…
Life is a planetary feature that depends on its environment, but it has also strongly shaped the physical conditions on Earth, having created conditions highly suitable for a productive biosphere. Clearly, the second law of thermodynamics…
Based on laboratory based growth of plant-like structures from inorganic materials, we present new theory for the emergence of plant structure at a range of scales dictated by levels of ionization (charge density), which can be traced…
Quantum physics and biology have long been regarded as unrelated disciplines, describing nature at the inanimate microlevel on the one hand and living species on the other hand. Over the last decades the life sciences have succeeded in…
The improbability of a spontaneously generated self-assembling molecule has suggested that life began with a set of simpler, collectively replicating elements, such as an enclosed autocatalytic set of polymers (or protocell). Since…
One of the most intriguing questions in evolution is how organisms exhibit suitable phenotypic variation to rapidly adapt in novel selective environments which is crucial for evolvability. Recent work showed that when selective environments…