Related papers: On the Rate of Abiogenesis from a Bayesian Informa…
Bayesian nonparametric methods are a popular choice for analysing survival data due to their ability to flexibly model the distribution of survival times. These methods typically employ a nonparametric prior on the survival function that is…
Trying to identify the entropy production within a cell has been part of debates and studies in the last century. First the idea was to make a resemblance of a cell with a Carnot engine, which is the most thermodynamically perfect machine.…
The chronological age used in demography describes the linear evolution of the life of a living being. The chronological age cannot give precise information about the exact developmental stage or aging processes an organism has reached. On…
Several aspects of mathematical astrobiology are discussed. It is argued that around the time of the origin of life the handedness of biomolecules must have established itself through an instability. Possible pathways of producing a certain…
The emergence of self-replication and information transmission in life's origin remains unexplained despite extensive research on the topic. A hypothesis explaining the transition from a simple organic world to a complex RNA world is…
The Gaia hypothesis postulates that life regulates its environment to be favorable for its own survival. Most planets experience numerous perturbations throughout their lifetimes such as asteroid impacts, volcanism, and the evolution of…
The Open Science Collaboration recently reported that 36% of published findings from psychological studies were reproducible by independent researchers. We can use this information together with Bayes theorem to estimate the statistical…
Approximate Bayesian computing is a powerful likelihood-free method that has grown increasingly popular since early applications in population genetics. However, complications arise in the theoretical justification for Bayesian inference…
The observed value $\Lambda_{\rm obs}$ of the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ is extremely smaller than theoretical expectations, and the anthropic argument has been proposed as a solution to this problem because galaxies do not form when…
Can information theory provide insights into whether exoplanets are habitable? Here we apply information theory to a range of simulated exoplanet transmission spectra as a diagnostic tool to search for potential signatures of life on…
We propose a novel definition of life in terms of which its emergence in the universe is expected, and its ever-creative open-ended evolution is entailed by no law. Living organisms are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic Closure,…
In a published paper [Sengupta, 2016], we have proposed that the brain (and other self-organized biological and artificial systems) can be characterized via the mathematical apparatus of a gauge theory. The picture that emerges from this…
After birth setting up an effective immune system is a major challenge for all living organisms. In this paper we show that this process can be explored by using the age-specific infant death rate as a kind of sensor. This is made possible…
A common assumption in evolutionary thought is that adaptation drives an increase in biological complexity. However, the rules governing evolution of complexity appear more nuanced. Evolution is deeply connected to learning, where…
Compartments are ubiquitous throughout biology, yet their importance stretches back to the origin of cells. In the context of origin of life, we assume that a protocell, a compartment enclosing functional components, requires $N$ components…
An organism that is newly introduced into an existing population has a survival probability that is dependent on both the population density of its environment and the competition it experiences with the members of that population.…
In Bayesian accelerated life testing, the most used tool for model comparison is the deviance information criterion. An alternative and more formal approach is to use Bayes factors to compare models. However, Bayesian accelerated life…
Sampling a probability distribution with known likelihood is a fundamental task in computational science and engineering. Aiming at multimodality, we propose a new sampling method that takes advantage of both birth-death process and…
We consider a stochastic model for a pathogen population in the presence of an immune response, in which pathogen types are partially ordered by ancestry and the immune system must eliminate ancestor types before it can eliminate their…
Weighted Updating generalizes Bayesian updating, allowing for biased beliefs by weighting the likelihood function and prior distribution with positive real exponents. I provide a rigorous foundation for the model by showing that…