Related papers: On the Rate of Abiogenesis from a Bayesian Informa…
The observation of life on Earth is generally accepted to be uninformative concerning the probability of life on other Earth-like planets, a belief first formalized by Brandon Carter and based on the selection effect of our existence. In a…
Even when concepts similar to emergence have been used since antiquity, we lack an agreed definition. However, emergence has been identified as one of the main features of complex systems. Most would agree on the statement ``life is…
To make informed decisions in natural environments that change over time, humans must update their beliefs as new observations are gathered. Studies exploring human inference as a dynamical process that unfolds in time have focused on…
The study of the origin of life on Earth has been broadened due to panspermia models that suggest that early life may have been transferred between planets. Mars likely once had conditions that could support life, and it is interesting…
The evolution of life has been a big enigma despite rapid advancements in the fields of biochemistry, astrobiology, and astrophysics in recent years. The answer to this puzzle has been as mind-boggling as the riddle relating to evolution of…
Statistical inference can be seen as information processing involving input information and output information that updates belief about some unknown parameters. We consider the Bayesian framework for making inferences about dynamical…
Approximately two-thirds of the Earth, the only known inhabited planet, is covered in ocean. Why not 0.01% or 99.99%? It has been previously suggested that this may represent a certain degree of fine-tuning, and thus perhaps observers are…
Implementing Bayesian inference is often computationally challenging in applications involving complex models, and sometimes calculating the likelihood itself is difficult. Synthetic likelihood is one approach for carrying out inference…
With the advent of high-performance computing, Bayesian methods are increasingly popular tools for the quantification of uncertainty throughout science and industry. Since these methods impact the making of sometimes critical decisions in…
Several exoplanets have been discovered to date, and the next step is the search for extraterrestrial life. However, it is difficult to estimate the number of life-bearing exoplanets because our only template is based on life on Earth. In…
The issue of how to create open-ended evolution in an artificial system is one the open problems in artificial life. This paper examines two of the factors that have some bearing on this issue, using the Tierra artificial life system. {\em…
Since its inception six decades ago, astrobiology has diversified immensely to encompass several scientific questions including the origin and evolution of Terran life, the organic chemical composition of extraterrestrial objects, and the…
The expansion of a population into new habitat is a transient process that leaves its footprints in the genetic composition of the expanding population. How the structure of the environment shapes the population front and the evolutionary…
Life has had a dramatic impact on the composition of Earth's atmosphere over time, which suggests that statistical studies of other inhabited planets' atmospheres could reveal how they co-evolve with life. While many evolutionary pathways…
Exoplanet science promises a continued rapid accumulation of new observations in the near future, energizing a drive to understand and interpret the forthcoming wealth of data to identify signs of life beyond our Solar System. The large…
Inverse analysis, such as model calibration, often suffers from a lack of informative data in complex real-world scenarios. The standard remedy, designing new experimental setups, is often costly and time-consuming, while readily available…
It is unclear how frequently life and intelligence arise on planets. I consider a Bayesian prior for the probability P(ETI) that intelligence evolves at a suitable site, with weight distributed evenly over ln(1 - ln P(ETI)). This log log…
Spatial extent is a complicating factor in mathematical biology. The possibility that an action at point A cannot immediately affect what happens at point B creates the opportunity for spatial nonuniformity. This nonuniformity must change…
This article reviews how organisms learn and recognize the world through the dynamics of neural networks from the perspective of Bayesian inference, and introduces a view on how such dynamics is described by the laws for the entropy of…
Biological sequences do not come at random. Instead, they appear with particular frequencies that reflect properties of the associated system or phenomenon. Knowing how biological sequences are distributed in sequence space is thus a…