Related papers: The Development of Darwin's Origin of Species
The general problem of "information foraging" in an environment about which agents have incomplete information has been explored in many fields, including cognitive psychology, neuroscience, economics, finance, ecology, and computer…
Darwin's book, Origin of the Species has been a source of public controversy for more than hundred and fifty years. Court cases and mountains of words have not dispelled this controversy. In this paper, a quantitative approach using simple…
Search in an environment with an uncertain distribution of resources involves a trade-off between exploitation of past discoveries and further exploration. This extends to information foraging, where a knowledge-seeker shifts between…
In a previews paper we introduced the quantitative method named Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS). With this method one can determine the historical roots of research fields and quantify their impact on current research. RPYS…
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
With unprecedented advances in genetic engineering we are starting to see progressively more original examples of synthetic life. As such organisms become more common it is desirable to be able to distinguish between natural and artificial…
The idea that all life on earth traces back to a common beginning dates back at least to Charles Darwin's {\em Origin of Species}. Ever since, biologists have tried to piece together parts of this `tree of life' based on what we can observe…
Darwin's hypothesis that all extant life forms are descendants of a last common ancestor cell and diversification of life forms results from gradual mutation plus natural selection represents a mainstream view that has influenced biology…
The current theory of evolution is almost the one Darwin and Wallace proposed two centuries ago and the following discoveries e.g., Mendelian genetics and neutral mutation theory have not made significant modifications. The current…
Bayesian methods since the time of Laplace have been understood by their practitioners as closely aligned to the scientific method. Indeed a recent champion of Bayesian methods, E. T. Jaynes, titled his textbook on the subject Probability…
Instructive influence of environment on heredity has been a debated topic for centuries. Darwin's identification of natural selection coupled to chance variation as the driving force for evolution, against a formal interpretation proposed…
An elementary biostatistical theory based on a selectivity-variability principle is proposed to address a question raised by Charles Darwin, namely, how one sex of a sexually dimorphic species might tend to evolve with greater variability…
While living in different historical era, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Albert Einstein (1879-1955) were both prolific correspondents: Darwin sent (received) at least 7,591 (6,530) letters during his lifetime while Einstein sent (received)…
Darwin's theory of evolution is considered to be one of the greatest scientific gems in modern science. It not only gives us a description of how living things evolve, but also shows how a population evolves through time and also, why only…
A tendency in biological theorizing is to formulate principles above or equal to Evolution by Variation and Selection of Darwin and Wallace. In this letter I analyze one such recent proposal which did so for the developmental ascendency. I…
Darwin claims in the {\em Origin} that similarity is evidence for common ancestry, but that adaptive similarities are "almost valueless" as evidence. This claim seems reasonable for some adaptive similarities but not for others. Here we…
Living things, computers, societies, and even books are part of a grand evolutionary struggle to survive. That struggle shapes nature, nations, religions, art, science, and you. What you think, feel, and do is determined by it. Darwinian…
We attempt to provide a comprehensive model of evolution of science across millennia taking into account the contributions of other intellectual traditions, cultural value system and increasing in sophistication of humans in their study of…
Although Darwinian models are rampant in the social sciences, social scientists do not face the problem that motivated Darwin's theory of natural selection: the problem of explaining how lineages evolve despite that any traits they acquire…
Since the early days of humankind, people have been asking questions about Nature of two kinds: why did that happen? And how can that be used? In a broad sense, science was born that day. We show indeed that science has two complementary…