Related papers: Chemical Heredity as Group Selection at the Molecu…
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…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology and Artificial Life (Bonner, 1988; Bedau et al., 2000). Complexification has been interpreted in different ways: as a process of diversification between evolving units…
The selection of a single molecular handedness, or homochirality across all living matter, is a mystery in the origin of life. Frank's seminal model showed in the fifties how chiral symmetry breaking can occur in non-equilibrium chemical…
We consider a stochastic model for evolution of group-structured populations in which interactions between group members correspond to the Prisoner's Dilemma or the Hawk-Dove game. Selection operates at two organization levels: individuals…
Mechanisms of immunity, and of the host-pathogen interactions in general are among the most fundamental problems of medicine, ecology, and evolution studies. Here, we present a microscopic, protein-level, sequence-based model of immune…
This paper develops a quasispecies model where cells can adopt a two-cell survival strategy. Within this strategy, pairs of cells join together, at which point one of the cells sacrifices its own replicative ability for the sake of the…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…
We consider the relationship between thermodynamics, fitness, and Darwinian selection in autocatalytic molecular replicators. We uncover a thermodynamic bound that relates fitness, replication rate, and thermodynamic affinity of…
One way to understand the role history plays on evolutionary trajectories is by giving ancient life a second opportunity to evolve. Our ability to empirically perform such an experiment, however, is limited by current experimental designs.…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
A general and basic model of primordial evolution--a soup of reacting finitary and discrete processes--is employed to identify and analyze fundamental mechanisms that generate and maintain complex structures in prebiotic systems. The…
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…
Enzymes are on the front lines of evolution. All living organisms rely on highly efficient, specific enzymes for growth, sustenance, and reproduction; and many diseases are a consequence of a mutation on an enzyme that affects its catalytic…
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…
I describe a new method of estimating the prevalence of life in the Universe, based on the fact that more chemically complex environments are more rare. The paper makes three main claims: (1) There is a statistically significant (inverse)…
The origin of life is often framed primarily as a chemical problem, yet life's defining feature is evolution. Advances in geochemistry, prebiotic chemistry, and molecular biology have produced diverse scenarios for the emergence of genomes,…
We propose a generic model of eco-systems, with a {\it hierarchical} food web structure. In our computer simulations we let the eco-system evolve continuously for so long that that we can monitor extinctions as well as speciations over…
The far-reaching consequences of ecological interactions in the dynamics of biological communities remain an intriguing subject. For decades, competition has been a cornerstone in ecological processes, but mounting evidence shows that…
Quantum chemical studies of reactivity involve calculations on a large number of molecular structures and comparison of their energies. Already the set-up of these calculations limits the scope of the results that one will obtain, because…
Using a set of heterogeneous competing systems with intra-system cooperation and inter-system aggression, we show how the coevolution of the system parameters (degree of organization and conditions for aggression) depends on the rate of…