Related papers: The Abiogenesis Timescale
Microbiome omics data including 16S rRNA reveal intriguing dynamic associations between the human microbiome and various disease states. Drastic changes in microbiota can be associated with factors like diet, hormonal cycles, diseases, and…
If the "Higgs mass" is not the physical mass of a real particle but rather an effective ultraviolet cutoff then a process energy dependence of this cutoff must be admitted. Precision data from at least two energy scale experimental points…
A comparison between the observed O-type star and the WR star populations and the theoretically predicted ones depends on the effects of stellar wind mass loss during various phases and rotation on stellar evolution and, last not least, on…
Selection among autocatalytic species fundamentally depends on their growth law: exponential species, whose number of copies grows exponentially, are mutually exclusive, while sub-exponential ones, whose number of copies grows polynomially,…
It is known that the hazard ratio lacks a useful causal interpretation. Even for data from a randomized controlled trial, the hazard ratio suffers from built-in selection bias as, over time, the individuals at risk in the exposed and…
It is often presumed, that life evolves relatively fast on planets with clement conditions, at least in its basic forms, and that extended periods of habitability are subsequently needed for the evolution of higher life forms. Many planets…
In the study of life tables the random variable of interest is usually assumed discrete since mortality rates are studied for integer ages. In dynamic life tables a time domain is included to account for the evolution effect of the hazard…
We present an individual based model of evolutionary ecology. The reproduction rate of individuals characterized by their genome depends on the composition of the population in genotype space. Ecological features such as the taxonomy and…
We study the statistics of the recurrence times between earthquakes above a certain magnitude M$ in California. We find that the distribution of the recurrence times strongly depends on the previous recurrence time $\tau_0$. As a…
In this article we provide a substantial discussion on the statistical concept of conditional independence, which is not routinely mentioned in most elementary statistics and mathematical statistics textbooks. Under the assumption of…
Adiabaticity occurs when, during its evolution, a physical system remains in the instantaneous eigenstate of the hamiltonian. Unfortunately, existing results, such as the quantum adiabatic theorem based on a slow down evolution (H(epsilon…
We propose a model of multispecies populations surviving on distributed resources. System dynamics are investigated under changes in abiotic factors such as the climate, as parameterized through environmental temperature. In particular, we…
Systematic uncertainties in the light-element abundances and their evolution make a rigorous statistical assessment difficult. However, using Bayesian methods we show that the following statement is robust: the predicted and measured…
One of the unique features associated with the Earth is that the fraction of its surface covered by land is comparable to that spanned by its oceans and other water bodies. Here, we investigate how extraterrestrial biospheres depend on the…
Time-series of allele frequencies are a useful and unique set of data to determine the strength of natural selection on the background of genetic drift. Technically, the selection coefficient is estimated by means of a likelihood function…
It has been argued that the limited set of proteins used by life as we know it could not have arisen by the process of Darwinian selection from all possible proteins. This probabilistic argument has a number of implicit assumptions that may…
This paper shows that differentiating the lifetimes of two phenotypes independently from their fertility can lead to a qualitative change in the equilibrium of a population: since survival and reproduction are distinct functional aspects of…
We consider a quantum-mechanical analysis of spontaneous emission in terms of an effective two-level system with a vacuum decay rate $\Gamma_0$ and transition angular frequency $\omega_A$. Our analysis is in principle exact, even though…
Ambitious civilizations that expand for resources at an intergalactic scale could be observable from a cosmological distance, but how likely is one to be visible to us? The question comes down to estimating the appearance rate of such…
Growth of the world population and the world economic growth were hyperbolic in the past 2,000,000 years. Recently, from around 1950, they started to be diverted to slower trajectories but they are still close to the historical hyperbolic…