Related papers: Foundations for reconstructing early microbial lif…
The origin of life must have been preceded by Darwin-like evolutionary dynamics that could propagate it. How did that adaptive dynamics arise? And from what prebiotic molecules? Using evolutionary invasion analysis, we develop a universal…
Throughout the evolution of biological species on Earth, cells and organs have developed many complex structures and processes to ensure their interactions with individual chemical molecules (small and macromolecular) and nanoscale objects…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic of…
Innovation and obsolescence describe the dynamics of ever-churning social and biological systems, from the development of economic markets to scientific and technological progress to biological evolution. They have been widely discussed,…
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.…
Element synthesis which started with p-p chain has resulted in several specific characteristics including lack of any stable isotope having atomic masses 5 or 8. The carbon to oxygen ratio is fixed early by the chain of coincidences. These,…
The study of the origin of life on Earth has been broadened due to panspermia models that suggest that early life may have been transferred between planets. Mars likely once had conditions that could support life, and it is interesting…
Protein synthesis is an important determinant of microbial growth and response that demands a high amount of metabolic and biosynthetic resources. Despite these costs, microbial species from different taxa and habitats massively synthesize…
We attempt to provide a comprehensive model of evolution of science across millennia taking into account the contributions of other intellectual traditions, cultural value system and increasing in sophistication of humans in their study of…
The oldest forms of living organisms on Earth are about 3.5 billion years old, and they are found in hydrothermal deposits, and it is often hypothesized that life originated there. But the hydrothermal systems with a fairly strong flow of…
Planet Earth and the biodiversity it supports are in crisis. Human impact on terrestrial, marine and freshwater ecosystems and the hundreds of thousands of organisms that inhabit them is global. To what extent can we push ecosystems before…
A theoretical study of cell evolution is presented here. By using a toolbox containing an intracellular catalytic reaction network model and a mutation-selection process, four distinct phases of self-organization were unveiled. First, the…
The question "What is life?" has been asked and studied by the researchers of various fields. Nevertheless, no global theory which unified various aspects of life has been proposed so far. Considering that the physical principle for the…
Our understanding of evolution is shaped strongly by how we conceive of its fundamental causes. In the original Modern Synthesis, evolution was defined as a process of shifting the frequencies of available alleles at many loci affecting a…
We live within an increasingly technological, information-laden environment for the first time in human evolution.This subjects us, and will continue to subject us in an accelerating fashion, to an unremitting exposure to meaningful…
The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of…
Metabolism displays striking and robust regularities in the forms of modularity and hierarchy, whose composition may be compactly described. This renders metabolic architecture comprehensible as a system, and suggests the order in which…
How multicellular life forms evolved out from unicellular ones constitutes a major problem in our understanding of the evolution of our biosphere. A recent set of experiments involving yeast cell populations has shown that selection for…
We apply the theory of learning to physically renormalizable systems in an attempt to develop a theory of biological evolution, including the origin of life, as multilevel learning. We formulate seven fundamental principles of evolution…
Iron (Fe) reduction is one of Earth's most ancient microbial metabolisms, but after atmosphere-ocean oxygenation, this anaerobic process was relegated to niche anoxic environments below the water and soil surface. However, new technologies…