Related papers: Quantifying the Emergence of Selection Prior to Bi…
To understand biological diversification, it is important to account for large-scale processes that affect the evolutionary history of groups of co-distributed populations of organisms. Such events predict temporally clustered divergences…
Most of the existing research in assembly pathway prediction/analysis of virus cap- sids makes the simplifying assumption that the configuration of the intermediate states can be extracted directly from the final configuration of the entire…
Metals -- heavy elements synthesized during various phases of stellar evolution or during supernova explosions -- play a fundamental role in shaping galaxy evolution. In fact, their relative abundances, spatial distribution, and scaling…
We study time evolution of a subsystem's density matrix under unitary evolution, generated by a sufficiently complex, say quantum chaotic, Hamiltonian, modeled by a random matrix. We exactly calculate all coherences, purity and…
A simple, heuristic formula with parallels to the Drake Equation is introduced to help focus discussion on open questions for the origins of life in a planetary context. This approach indicates a number of areas where quantitative progress…
By measuring or calculating coalescence times for several models of coalescence or evolution, with and without selection, we show that the ratios of these coalescence times become universal in the large size limit and we identify a few…
Quantum chemical studies of reactivity involve calculations on a large number of molecular structures and comparison of their energies. Already the set-up of these calculations limits the scope of the results that one will obtain, because…
We examine the feasibility of predicting and subsequently managing the future evolution of a Complex Adaptive System. Our archetypal system mimics a competitive population of mechanical, biological, informational or human objects. We show…
Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized that all of…
Directed evolution is a versatile technique in protein engineering that mimics the process of natural selection by iteratively alternating between mutagenesis and screening in order to search for sequences that optimize a given property of…
The emergence of life from inanimate matter presents a thermodynamic challenge: the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates a global trend towards disorder, yet life constitutes localized pockets of profound organization. This paper presents…
One way to understand the role history plays on evolutionary trajectories is by giving ancient life a second opportunity to evolve. Our ability to empirically perform such an experiment, however, is limited by current experimental designs.…
Open-ended evolution requires unbounded possibilities that evolving entities can explore. The cardinality of a set of those possibilities thus has a significant implication for the open-endedness of evolution. We propose that facilitating…
In-depth studies of sociotechnical systems are largely limited to single instances. Network surveys are expensive, and platforms vary in important ways, from interface design, to social norms, to historical contingencies. With single…
The first generation of large-scale chemical tagging surveys, in particular the HERMES/GALAH million star survey, promises to vastly expand our understanding of the chemical and dynamical evolution of the Galaxy. This, however, is…
The overwhelming majority of molecules remains unexplored. This is mostly due to the sheer number of them, which prohibits any enumeration of chemical space, the set of all such molecules. In practice, only subsets of chemical space are…
A fundamental problem in protobiological dynamics is to understand how chemically generated polymers can form persistent sequence distributions before the emergence of replication. We study deterministic polymer growth in which each finite…
Reliable predictions of the behaviour of chemical systems are essential across many industries, from nanoscale engineering over validation of advanced materials to nanotoxicity assessment in health and medicine. For the future we therefore…
A central and long-standing issue in evolutionary theory is the origin of the biological variation upon which natural selection acts1. Some hypotheses suggest that evolutionary change represents an adaptation to the surrounding environment…
We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…