Related papers: Interplanetary transmissions of life in an evoluti…
With several short-period, Earth-mass planets in the habitable zone, the TRAPPIST-1 system potentially allows litho-panspermia to take place on very short timescales. We investigate the efficiency and speed of inter-planetary material…
Sex is considered as an evolutionary paradox, since its evolutionary advantage does not necessarily overcome the two fold cost of sharing half of one's offspring's genome with another member of the population. Here we demonstrate that…
We discovered a dynamic phase transition induced by sexual reproduction. The dynamics is a pure Darwinian rule with both fundamental ingredients to drive evolution: 1) random mutations and crossings which act in the sense of increasing the…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
The dynamic nature of life's ability to thrive in diverse and changing planetary environments suggests that habitability and survival depend on the evolutionary path and life adaptation to environmental conditions. Here we explore such…
Our understanding of the processes that are relevant to the formation and maintenance of habitable planetary systems is advancing at a rapid pace, both from observation and theory. The present review focuses on recent research that bears on…
To assess the number of life-bearing worlds in astrophysical environments, it is necessary to take the intertwined processes of abiogenesis (birth), extinction (death), and transfer of life (migration) into account. We construct a…
We are at a stage in our evolution where we do not yet know if we will ever communicate with intelligent beings that have evolved on other planets, yet we are intelligent and curious enough to wonder about this. We find ourselves wondering…
Is evolution always gradual or can it make leaps? We examine a mathematical model of an evolutionary process on a fitness landscape and obtain analytic solutions for the probability of multi-mutation leaps, that is, several mutations…
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…
Using a lattice model based on Monte Carlo simulations, we study the role of the reproduction pattern on the fate of an evolving population. Each individual is under the selection pressure from the environment and random mutations. The…
Apparent biodiversity on earth exists only if we compare different species separated from their environments. Meanwhile coexisting species have to be identical in terms of energetic interactions. Consider the biosphere as a network of…
The biological world, especially its majority microbial component, is strongly interacting and may be dominated by collective effects. In this review, we provide a brief introduction for statistical physicists of the way in which living…
Impactors have hit the Earth since its formation and have continued to be infrequent guests throughout the Earth's history. Although the early part of the Earth's history was marked by these violent events, life was present early, possibly…
We present an analytic model to estimate the total number of rocky or icy objects that could be captured by planetary systems within the Milky Way galaxy and result in panspermia should they harbor life. We estimate the capture rate of…
The existence of intelligent, interstellar traveling and colonising life is a key assumption behind the Fermi Paradox. Until recently, detecting signs of life elsewhere has been so technically challenging as to seem almost impossible.…
How coperation between self-interested individuals evolve is a crucial problem, both in biology and in social sciences, that is far from being well understood. Evolutionary game theory is a useful approach to this issue. The simplest model…
Using Monte Carlo model of biological evolution we have discovered that populations can switch between two different strategies of their genomes' evolution; Darwinian purifying selection and complementing the haplotypes. The first one is…
A planetary system may undergo significant radial rearrangement during the early part of its lifetime. Planet migration can come about through interaction with the surrounding planetesimal disk and the gas disk--while the latter is still…
Despite great advances in our understanding of the formation of the Solar System, the evolution of the Earth, and the chemical basis for life, we are not much closer than the ancient Greeks to an answer of whether life has arisen and…