Related papers: Darwinian Evolution of Taste
Natural selection successfully explains how organisms accumulate adaptive change despite that traits acquired over a lifetime are eliminated at the end of each generation. However, in some domains that exhibit cumulative, adaptive change --…
The evolution of colour vision is captivating, as it reveals the adaptive strategies of extinct species while simultaneously inspiring innovations in modern imaging technology. In this study, we present a simplified model of visual…
By 2050, the global population will exceed 9 billion, demanding a 70% increase in food production. Animal proteins alone may not suffice and contribute to global warming. Alternative proteins such as legumes, algae, and insects are being…
Protein dynamics form a critical bridge between protein structure and function, yet the impact of evolution on ultrafast processes inside proteins remains enigmatic. This study delves deep into nanosecond-scale protein dynamics of a…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
Evolution is a fundamental process that shapes the biological world we inhabit, and reinforcement learning is a powerful tool used in artificial intelligence to develop intelligent agents that learn from their environment. In recent years,…
Proteins display generic properties that are challenging to explain by direct selection, notably allostery, the capacity to be regulated through long-range effects, and evolvability, the capacity to adapt to new selective pressures. An…
The origin and development of consciousness is poorly understood. Although it is clearly a naturalistic phenomenon evolved through Darwinian evolution, explaining it in terms of physicochemical, neural, or symbolic mechanisms remains…
We consider the relationship between thermodynamics, fitness, and Darwinian selection in autocatalytic molecular replicators. We uncover a thermodynamic bound that relates fitness, replication rate, and thermodynamic affinity of…
Life systems are complex and hierarchical, with diverse components at different scales, yet they sustain themselves, grow, and evolve over time. How can a theory of such complex biological states be developed? Here we note that for a…
In eukaryotic genes the protein coding sequence is split into several fragments, the exons, separated by non-coding DNA stretches, the introns. Prokaryotes do not have introns in their genome. We report the calculations of stability domains…
It has recently been suggested that the fundamental haploid-diploid cycle of eukaryotic sex exploits a rudimentary form of the Baldwin effect. Thereafter the other associated phenomena can be explained as evolution tuning the amount and…
The protein folding problem must ultimately be solved on all length scales from the atomic up through a hierarchy of complicated structures. By analyzing the stability of the folding process using physics and mathematics, this paper shows…
Current models of animal evolution focus on selection of individuals, ignoring the much faster selection of symbiotic bacteria. Here we take host-symbiont interactions into account by introducing a Population Genetics-like model of…
Jim Shapiro synthesizes a great many observations about the mechanisms of evolution to reach the remarkable conclusion that large-scale modification, exchange, and rearrangement of the genome are common and should be viewed as fundamental…
The sequence of a protein is not only constrained by its physical and biochemical properties under current selection, but also by features of its past evolutionary history. Understanding the extent and the form that these evolutionary…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
Darwinian Theory depicts life as being overwhelmingly consumed by a fight for survival in a hostile environment. However, from a thermodynamic perspective, life is a dynamic, out of equilibrium process, stabilizing and coevolving in concert…
This is my attempt to answer Schr\"odinger's question: "What is Life?". In living cell the local combination of atoms is reproduced with incredible accuracy. In the case of protein biosynthesis the notion of the physical aspect of the…
The evolution of neutrino flavor in dense environments such as core-collapse supernovae and binary compact object mergers constitutes an important and unsolved problem. Its solution has potential implications for the dynamics and…