Related papers: On the Rate of Abiogenesis from a Bayesian Informa…
One of the major goals for astronomy in the next decades is the remote search for biosignatures (i.e.\ the spectroscopic evidence of biological activity) in exoplanets. Here, we adopt a Bayesian statistical framework to discuss the…
Prior information often takes the form of parameter constraints. Bayesian methods include such information through prior distributions having constrained support. By using posterior sampling algorithms, one can quantify uncertainty without…
The origin of life is often approached through the lens of replication, heredity, or molecular specificity. This paper proposes a thermodynamic framework in which the emergence of life is driven by the persistence of reaction pathways that…
We develop a result on expected posteriors for Bayesians with heterogenous priors, dubbed information validates the prior (IVP). Under familiar ordering requirements, Anne expects a (Blackwell) more informative experiment to bring Bob's…
Biosystems contain an almost infinite amount of vital important details, which together ensure their life. There are, however, some common structures and reactions in the systems: the homochirality of carbohydrates and proteins, the…
Stochastic kinetic models are often used to describe complex biological processes. Typically these models are analytically intractable and have unknown parameters which need to be estimated from observed data. Ideally we would have…
Gene regulatory network of lambda phage is one the best studied model systems in molecular biology. More 50 years of experimental study has provided a tremendous amount of data at all levels: physics, chemistry, DNA, protein, and function.…
This paper extends the work of Clarke [1] on the Bayesian foundations of the biomagnetic inverse problem. It derives expressions for the expectation and variance of the a posteriori source current probability distribution given a prior…
Speculation about the existence of advanced forms of life in the Universe and in our galaxy, has been since ever a subject of fascination and discussion in fiction, as well as in astrophysics, biology and philosophy. The well-known Fermi's…
A simple stochastic model for evolution, based upon the need to pass a sequence of n critical steps (Carter 1983, Watson 2008) is applied to both terrestrial and extraterrestrial origins of life. In the former case, the time at which humans…
The theory of lithopanspermia proposes the natural exchange of organisms between solar system bodies through meteorites. The focus of this theory comprises three distinct stages: planetary ejection, interplanetary transit and planetary…
Planet Earth has evolved from an entirely anoxic planet with possibly a different tectonic regime to the oxygenated world with horizontal plate tectonics that we know today. For most of this time, Earth has been inhabited by a purely…
The existing life table method needs to calculate the age-specific mortality first, not only has too many and complicated calculation steps, but also introduces the multiple approximation to bring error. This paper redefines the probability…
Space biology research aims to understand fundamental effects of spaceflight on organisms, develop foundational knowledge to support deep space exploration, and ultimately bioengineer spacecraft and habitats to stabilize the ecosystem of…
An early burst of speciation followed by a subsequent slowdown in the rate of diversification is commonly inferred from molecular phylogenies. This pattern is consistent with some verbal theory of ecological opportunity and adaptive…
The discovery of inhabited exoplanets hinges on identifying biosignature gases. JWST can reveal biosignature gases, though current discoveries have yet to evidence life. The central challenge is attribution: how can we confidently identify…
Abiotic emergence of ordered information stored in the form of RNA is an important unresolved problem concerning the origin of life. A polymer longer than 40--100 nucleotides is necessary to expect a self-replicating activity, but the…
Interpretation of empirical results based on a taxa's lifetime distribution shows apparently conflicting results. Species' lifetime is reported to be exponentially distributed, whereas higher order taxa, such as families or genera, follow a…
The present paper introduces a fully objective Bayesian analysis to obtain the posterior distribution of an entropy measure. Notably, we consider the gamma distribution, which describes many natural phenomena in physics, engineering, and…
One of the longest standing open problems in science is how life arises from non-living matter. If it is possible to measure this transition in the lab, then it might be possible to understand the physical mechanisms by which the emergence…