Related papers: The Abiogenesis Timescale
The Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) algorithm considers natural selection in biology as a guiding principle for statistical model selection and parameter estimation. We take this ABC approach to cosmology and use it to infer which…
The phenomenon of life is discussed within a framework of its origin as defined by four hypotheses. The 1. hypothesis says: Life, as we know, is (H-C-N-O) based and relies on the number of bulk (Na-Mg-P-S-Cl-K-Ca) and trace elements…
Twenty years ago, after analysing palaeontological data, Raup and Sepkoski suggested that mass extinctions on Earth appear cyclically in time with a period of approximately 26 million years (My). To explain the 26My period, a number of…
A wide variety of scenarios for the origin of life have been proposed, with many influencing the prevalence and distribution of biosignatures across exoplanet populations. This relationship suggests these scenarios can be tested by…
Scale independence is a ubiquitous feature of complex systems which implies a highly skewed distribution of resources with no characteristic scale. Research has long focused on why systems as varied as protein networks, evolution and stock…
The focus of a survival study is partly on the distribution of survival times, and partly on the health or quality of life of patients while they live. Health varies over time, and survival is the most basic aspect of health, so the two…
Darwin's hypothesis that all extant life forms are descendants of a last common ancestor cell and diversification of life forms results from gradual mutation plus natural selection represents a mainstream view that has influenced biology…
Compartments are ubiquitous throughout biology, yet their importance stretches back to the origin of cells. In the context of origin of life, we assume that a protocell, a compartment enclosing functional components, requires $N$ components…
Measuring the statistical dependence between observed signals is a primary tool for scientific discovery. However, biological systems often exhibit complex non-linear interactions that currently cannot be captured without a priori knowledge…
Over the last decade several attempts have been made to extend biodiversity studies in ways that would allow researchers to explore how biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships may change across different spatial and temporal…
Recently, several researchers have claimed that conclusions obtained from a Bayes factor (or the posterior odds) may contradict those obtained from Bayesian posterior estimation. In this short paper, we wish to point out that no such…
The helioseismic determination of the solar age has been a subject of several studies because it provides us with an independent estimation of the age of the solar system. We present the Bayesian estimates of the helioseismic age of the…
One of the most difficult problems in the foundations of physics is what gives rise to the arrow of time. Since the fundamental dynamical laws of physics are (essentially) symmetric in time, the explanation for time's arrow must come from…
Empirical observations in marine ecosystems have suggested a balance of biological and advection time scales as a possible explanation of species coexistence. To characterise this scenario, we measure the time to fixation in neutrally…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
The affirmative statement of the existence of extraterrestrial life is tentatively raised to the status of a principle. Accordingly, Fermi's question is answered and the anthropic principle is shown to be falsifiable. The time-scale for the…
Heritability is a central concept in the long-standing debate about nature versus nurture in biological and social sciences. However, existing notions of heritability are based on strong assumptions and do not use explicit causal models. We…
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…
Establishing that a set of population-splitting events occurred at the same time can be a potentially persuasive argument that a common process affected the populations. Oaks et al. (2013) assessed the ability of an approximate-Bayesian…
The improbability of a spontaneously generated self-assembling molecule has suggested that life began with a set of simpler, collectively replicating elements, such as an enclosed autocatalytic set of polymers (or protocell). Since…