Related papers: A Formal Physical Framework for the Origin of Life…
Natural selection favors the more successful individuals. This is the elementary premise that pervades common models of evolution. Under extreme conditions, however, the process may no longer be probabilistic. Those that meet certain…
Since its inception six decades ago, astrobiology has diversified immensely to encompass several scientific questions including the origin and evolution of Terran life, the organic chemical composition of extraterrestrial objects, and the…
Topology transcends boundaries that conventionally delineate physical, biological and engineering sciences. Our ability to mathematically describe topology, combined with our access to precision tracking and manipulation approaches, has…
Recent theoretical progress in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, linking the physical principle of Maximum Entropy Production ("MEP") to the information-theoretical "MaxEnt" principle of scientific inference, together with conjectures from…
Biological evolution is a complex blend of ever changing structural stability, variability and emergence of new phenotypes, niches, ecosystems. We wish to argue that the evolution of life marks the end of a physics world view of law…
Selection is central to biological evolution, yet there has been no general experimental framework for quantifying selection in chemical systems before life. Here we demonstrate that selection in a prebiological chemical system can be…
Life occurs in concentrated `Ringer Solutions' derived from seawater that Lesser Blum studied for most of his life. As we worked together, Lesser and I realized that the questions asked of those solutions were quite different in biology…
We survey some of the philosophical challenges and pitfalls within origins research. Several of these challenges exhibit circularities, paradoxes, or anthropic biases. We present origins approaches in terms of three broad categories:…
Variational principles play a fundamental role in deriving evolution equations of physics. They are working well in case of nondissipative evolution but for dissipative systems they are not unique, not predictive and not constructive. With…
The existence of life is one of the most fundamental problems of astrophysics. The intriguing existence of progressively complex and apparently improbable living beings should be a general tendency of life in the Universe. We are looking…
Recent research has extended methods from the fields of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics into other disciplines. Most notably, one recent work creates a unified theoretical framework to understand evolutionary biology, machine…
In this paper we will try to provide a formalization of some characteristics of the development of biological systems aiming at the highest level of adequacy: justificative adequacy, that is, not only what we observe (descriptive adequacy)…
According to the "hard-steps" model, the origin of humanity required "successful passage through a number of intermediate steps" (so-called "hard" or "critical" steps) that were intrinsically improbable with respect to the total time…
Establishing the emergence of evolutionary behavior as a defining characteristic of 'life' is a major step in the Artificial life (ALife) studies. We present here an abstract formal framework for this aim based upon the notion of high-level…
The phenomenon of preadaptation, or exaptation (wherein a trait that originally evolved to solve one problem is co-opted to solve a new problem) presents a formidable challenge to efforts to describe biological phenomena using a classical…
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…
The origin of life on Earth via the spontaneous emergence of a protocell prior to Darwinian evolution remains a fundamental open question in physics and chemistry. Here, we develop a conceptual framework based on information theory and…
Ultraviolet light incident on organic material can initiate its spontaneous dissipative structuring into chromophores which can then catalyze their own replication. This may have been the case for one of the most ancient of all chromophores…
We present a novel cosmological framework that unifies matter creation dynamics with thermodynamic principles. Starting with a single-component fluid characterized by a constant equation of state parameter, $\omega$, we introduce a…
Biodiversity widely observed in ecological systems is attributed to the dynamical balance among the competing species. The time-varying populations of the interacting species are often captured rather well by a set of deterministic…