Related papers: On the Rate of Abiogenesis from a Bayesian Informa…

We distinguish two questions (i) how much information does the prior contain? and (ii) what is the effect of the prior? Several measures have been proposed for quantifying effective prior sample size, for example Clarke [1996] and Morita et…

The dynamic instability of the living systems and the "superposition" of different forms of randomness are viewed as a component of the contingently increasing organization of life along evolution. We briefly survey how classical and…

We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…

The contribution to an organism's phenotype from one genetic locus may depend upon the status of other loci. Such epistatic interactions among loci are now recognized as fundamental to shaping the process of adaptation in evolving…

Measuring the statistical dependence between observed signals is a primary tool for scientific discovery. However, biological systems often exhibit complex non-linear interactions that currently cannot be captured without a priori knowledge…

This article analyzes the problem of estimating the time until an event occurs, also known as survival modeling. We observe through substantial experiments on large real-world datasets and use-cases that populations are largely…

Climate change has become a significant global concern due to its capacity to cause substantial disruption to daily life by increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. Given the rising trend of human interventions in…

This philosophical paper explores the relation between modern scientific simulations and the future of the universe. We argue that a simulation of an entire universe will result from future scientific activity. This requires us to tackle…

Life forms exhibit such a degree of exquisite organization that it seems impossible that they could have developed out of a process of trial and error, as intimated by the theory of Darwinian evolution. In this general public paper I…

Ambitious civilizations that expand for resources at an intergalactic scale could be observable from a cosmological distance, but how likely is one to be visible to us? The question comes down to estimating the appearance rate of such…

Modern developments in nonequilibrium thermodynamics have significant implications for the origins of life. The reasons for this are closely related to a generalized version of the second law of thermodynamics recently found for entropy…

Place an $A$-particle at each site of a graph independently with probability $p$ and otherwise place a $B$-particle. $A$- and $B$-particles perform independent continuous time random walks at rates $\lambda_A$ and $\lambda_B$, respectively,…

It is shown that a consistent application of Bayesian updating from a prior probability density to a posterior using evidence in the form of expectation constraints leads to exactly the same results as the application of the maximum entropy…

Bayesian hypothesis testing is re-examined from the perspective of an a priori assessment of the test statistic distribution under the alternative. By assessing the distribution of an observable test statistic, rather than prior parameter…

In the coming years and decades, advanced space- and ground-based observatories will allow an unprecedented opportunity to probe the atmospheres and surfaces of potentially habitable exoplanets for signatures of life. Life on Earth, through…

We study the convergence rates of empirical Bayes posterior distributions for nonparametric and high-dimensional inference. We show that as long as the hyperparameter set is discrete, the empirical Bayes posterior distribution induced by…

We study the distribution of the 'gap time', the first time that a large gap appears, in the spatial birth and death point process on $[0,1]$ in which particles are added uniformly in space at rate $\lambda$ and are removed independently at…

Organisms and algorithms learn probability distributions from previous observations, either over evolutionary time or on the fly. In the absence of regularities, estimating the underlying distribution from data would require observing each…

This paper is not (or at least not only) about human infant mortality. In line with reliability theory, "infant" will refer here to the time interval following birth during which the mortality (or failure) rate decreases. This definition…

We live in a time where climate models predict future increases in environmental variability and biological invasions are becoming increasingly frequent. A key to developing effective responses to biological invasions in increasingly…