Related papers: Can a rudderless species survive?
Many observed giant planets lie on eccentric orbits. Such orbits could be the result of strong scatterings with other giant planets. The same dynamical instability that produces these scatterings may also cause habitable planets in interior…
Marine species reproduce and compete while being advected by turbulent flows. It is largely unknown, both theoretically and experimentally, how population dynamics and genetics are changed by the presence of fluid flows. Discrete…
The ease of interstellar rocket travel is an issue with implications for the long term fate of our own and other civilizations and for the much-debated number of technological civilizations in the Galaxy. We show that the physical barrier…
Consider a supercritical branching random walk in a time-inhomogeneous random environment. We impose a selection (called barrier) on survival in the following way. The position of the barrier may depend on the generation and the…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event…
One of the most interesting unsolved questions in science today is the question of life on other planets. At the present time it is safe to say that we do not have much of an idea as to whether life is common or exceedingly rare in the…
Natural panspermia is a transport-and-establishment hypothesis, not a theory of abiogenesis. The Earth-specific question is whether any nonterrestrial donor remains competitive with terrestrial origin once launch, planetary-system escape,…
Can reproduction alone in the context of survival produce intelligence in our machines? In this work, self-replication is explored as a mechanism for the emergence of intelligent behavior in modern learning environments. By focusing purely…
It is not currently possible to create a living organism ab initio due to the overwhelming complexity of biological systems. In fact, the origin of life mechanism, this being how biological organisms form from non-living matter, is unknown.…
We propose two models of the evolution of a pair of competing populations. Both are lattice based. The first is a compromise between fully spatial models, which do not appear amenable to analytic results, and interacting particle system…
The provision of intergenerational care, via the Grandmother Hypothesis, has been implicated in the evolution of post-fertile longevity, particularly in humans. However, if grandmothering does provide fitness benefits, a key question is why…
We consider one dimensional random walks in random environment where every time the process stays at a location, it dies with a fixed probability. Under some mild assumptions it is easy to show that the survival probability goes to zero as…
Social insect colonies can be seen as a distinct form of biological organization because they function as superorganisms. Understanding how natural selection acts on the emergence and maintenance of these colonies remains a major question…
Open-ended evolutionary dynamics remains an elusive goal for artificial evolutionary systems. Many ideas exist in the biological literature beyond the basic Darwinian requirements of variation, differential reproduction and inheritance. I…
One of the most highly debated questions in the field of animal swarming and social behaviour, is the collective random patterns and chaotic behaviour formed by some animal species, in particular if there is a danger. Is such a behaviour…
It is often suggested that extraterrestial life sufficiently advanced to be capable of interstellar travel or communication must be rare, since otherwise we would have seen evidence of it by now. This in turn is sometimes taken as indirect…
Theoretical analysis proves that human survivability is dominated by an unusual physical, rather than biological, mechanism, which yields an exact law. The law agrees with all experimental data, but, contrary to existing theories, it is the…
To first order, the initial cluster luminosity function appears to be universal. This means that the brightest young cluster in a galaxy can be predicted from the total number of young clusters based purely on statistics. This suggests that…
Earth-like planets are expected to provide the greatest opportunity for the detection of life beyond the Solar System. However our planet cannot be considered a fair sample, especially if intelligent life exists elsewhere. Just as a…
We study the multi-species replicator model with linear fitness and random fitness matrices of various classes. By means of numerical resolution of the replicator equations, we determine the survival probability of a species in terms of its…