Related papers: The Abiogenesis Timescale
Earth will become uninhabitable within 2-3 Gyr as a result of the moving boundaries of the habitable zone caused by the increasing luminosity of the Sun. Predictions about the future of habitable conditions on Earth include a decline in…
Bayes factors are characterized by both the powerful mathematical framework of Bayesian statistics and the useful interpretation as evidence quantification. Former requires a parameter distribution that changes by seeing the data, latter…
Ecological and evolutionary dynamics have been historically regarded as unfolding at broadly separated timescales. However, these two types of processes are nowadays well documented to much more tightly than traditionally assumed,…
The terrestrial fossil record shows a significant variation in the extinction and origination rates of species during the past half billion years. Numerous studies have claimed an association between this variation and the motion of the Sun…
Cell decision-making refers to the process by which cells gather information from their local microenvironment and regulate their internal states to create appropriate responses. Microenvironmental cell sensing plays a key role in this…
How typical elements that shape organisms, such as protein secondary structures, have evolved, or how evolutionarily susceptible/resistant they are to environmental changes, are significant issues in evolutionary biology, structural…
In unicellular organisms such as bacteria and in most viruses, mutations mainly occur during reproduction. Thus, genotypes with a high birth rate should have a higher mutation rate. However, standard models of asexual adaptation such as the…
Many life-history traits, like the age at maturity or adult longevity, are important determinants of the generation time. For instance, semelparous species whose adults reproduce once and die have shorter generation times than iteroparous…
The prognosis for potential resources of abiotic natural gas and petroleum depends critically upon the nature and circumstances of Earth formation. Until recently, that prognosis has been considered solely within the framework of the…
The problem of the rate and mechanisms of biological evolution was considered. It was shown that species could not be formed due to undirected mutations in characteristic times of about one million years. A mechanism of deterministic…
Life has had a dramatic impact on the composition of Earth's atmosphere over time, which suggests that statistical studies of other inhabited planets' atmospheres could reveal how they co-evolve with life. While many evolutionary pathways…
With the characterisations of potentially habitable planetary atmospheres on the horizon, the search for biosignatures is set to become a major area of research in the coming decades. To understand the atmospheric characteristics that might…
Affinity Maturation (AM) is the process through which the immune system is able to develop potent antibodies against new pathogens it encounters, and is at the base of the efficacy of vaccines. At its core AM is analogous to a Darwinian…
It is shown that, contrary to an existing claim, the near equality between the lifetime of the sun and the timescale of biological evolution on earth does not necessarily imply that extraterrestrial civilizations are exceedingly rare.…
Consider a branching process with a homogeneous reproduction law. Sampling a single cell uniformly from the population at a time $T > 0$ and looking along the sampled cell's ancestral lineage, we find that the reproduction law is…
We study a branching random walk on $\r$ with an absorbing barrier. The position of the barrier depends on the generation. In each generation, only the individuals born below the barrier survive and reproduce. Given a reproduction law,…
To reduce the current theory uncertainties a novel way to determine the $B_c$ lifetime, $\tau_{B_c}$, is proposed. Taking the difference of the $B_c$, and $B$ and $D$ meson decay rates eliminates the leading contributions from the…
A theory of aging based on the principles of the kinetics of chemical reactions and the rules of natural selection of organisms is proposed. The theory is based on a hypothesis that the biochemical processes in the organism can be described…
Essential insights on the characterization and quality of a detectable biosphere are gained by analyzing the effects of its environmental parameters. We compiled environmental and biological properties of the Phanerozoic Eon from various…
A central issue in ecology today is that of the factors determining the relative abundance of species within a natural community. The proper application of the principles of statistical physics to the problem of species abundance…