Related papers: On the Rate of Abiogenesis from a Bayesian Informa…
The improbability of a spontaneously generated self-assembling molecule has suggested that life began with a set of simpler, collectively replicating elements, such as an enclosed autocatalytic set of polymers (or protocell). Since…
In ecology we may find scenarios where the same phenomenon (species occurrence, species abundance, etc.) is observed using two different types of samplers. For instance, species data can be collected from scientific sampling with a…
The original hypothesis about Three-stage origin of life (TOL) on the Earth is developed and discussed. The role of the temperature factor in life origin is considered. It is supposed, that three stages of abiogenesis (DNA world, RNA world…
A simple, heuristic formula with parallels to the Drake Equation is introduced to help focus discussion on open questions for the origins of life in a planetary context. This approach indicates a number of areas where quantitative progress…
Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…
The prediction that (due to the limited amount of hydrogen available as fuel in the Sun) the future duration of our favourable terrestrial environment will be short (compared with the present age of the Earth) has been interpreted as…
We use a probability theory framework to discuss the search for biosignatures. This perspective allows us to analyse the potential for different biosignatures to provide convincing evidence of extraterrestrial life and to formalise…
At any moment in time, evolution is faced with a formidable challenge: refining the already highly optimised design of biological species, a feat accomplished through all preceding generations. In such a scenario, the impact of random…
It is often presumed, that life evolves relatively fast on planets with clement conditions, at least in its basic forms, and that extended periods of habitability are subsequently needed for the evolution of higher life forms. Many planets…
Many scientifically well-motivated statistical models in natural, engineering and environmental sciences are specified through a generative process, but in some cases it may not be possible to write down a likelihood for these models…
A natural example of evolution can be described by a time-dependent two degrees-of-freedom Hamiltonian. We choose the case where initially the Hamiltonian derives from a general cubic potential, the linearised system has frequencies 1 and…
With the characterisations of potentially habitable planetary atmospheres on the horizon, the search for biosignatures is set to become a major area of research in the coming decades. To understand the atmospheric characteristics that might…
The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) aims to characterize habitable exoplanets in search of signs of life. However, detectable life may be rare, either because abiogenesis is intrinsically contingent and unlikely, or because biospheres…
Inferring dependencies between complex biological traits while accounting for evolutionary relationships between specimens is of great scientific interest yet remains infeasible when trait and specimen counts grow large. The…
Bayesian analyses are often performed using so-called noninformative priors, with a view to achieving objective inference about unknown parameters on which available data depends. Noninformative priors depend on the relationship of the data…
Natural selection explains how life has evolved over millions of years from more primitive forms. The speed at which this happens, however, has sometimes defied formal explanations when based on random (uniformly distributed) mutations.…
In ecology, the description of species composition and biodiversity calls for statistical methods that involve estimating features of interest in unobserved samples based on an observed one. In the last decade, the Bayesian nonparametrics…
The ratio of Bayesian evidences is a popular tool in cosmology to compare different models. There are however several issues with this method: Bayes' ratio depends on the prior even in the limit of non-informative priors, and Jeffrey's…
Cosmologists wish to explain how our Universe, in all its complexity, could ever have come about. For that, we assess the number of states in our Universe now. This plays the role of entropy in thermodynamics of the Universe, and reveals…
Established frameworks to understand problems with reproducibility in science begin with the relationship between our understanding of the prior probability of a claim and the statistical certainty that should be demanded of it, and explore…