Related papers: How bio-friendly is the universe
Life forms exhibit such a degree of exquisite organization that it seems impossible that they could have developed out of a process of trial and error, as intimated by the theory of Darwinian evolution. In this general public paper I…
Existential rules are an expressive knowledge representation language mainly developed to query data. In the literature, they are often supposed to be in some normal form that simplifies technical developments. For instance, a common…
The rich and varied ways that genetic material can be passed between species has motivated extensive research into the theory of phylogenetic networks. Features that align with biological processes, or with desirable mathematical…
It is often claimed that the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic and time-symmetric and that therefore our experience of the passage of time is an illusion. This paper will critically discuss these claims and show that they are…
The goals of the astrobiology community are focussed on developing a framework for the detection of biosignatures, or evidence thereof, on objects inside and outside of our solar system. A fundamental aspect of understanding the limits of…
Modern biological tools have made it possible to unequivocally demonstrate the deep relationship among species in terms of genes and basic molecular mechanisms. In addition, results from genetic, physical and physiological approaches…
In our daily life experiences we face localized objects which are "here or there" not "here and there". The state of a cat could be "dead and alive" at the same time from a quantum mechanical point of view, which is not in agreement with…
Information is a key concept in evolutionary biology. Information is stored in biological organism's genomes, and used to generate the organism as well as to maintain and control it. Information is also "that which evolves". When a…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
Surprisingly, the question "Is there Life in the Universe outside Earth?" has been raised, in rational terms, almost only in the western literature throughout the ages. In a first part I justify this statement. Then I try to develop an…
Recent detections of potentially habitable exoplanets around sunlike stars demand increased exploration of the physical conditions that can sustain life, by whatever methods available. Insight into these conditions can be gained by…
The scientific community believes in the theory of evolution with a passion that rivals that of any religious belief. This passion extends beyond the irrefutable evidence of the fossil record to the familiar claims of survival of the…
Free will discourse is primarily centred around the thesis of determinism. Much of the literature takes determinism as its starting premise, assuming it true for the sake of discussion, and then proceeds to present arguments for why, if…
The possibility to describe the laws of the Universe in a computational way seems to be correlated to a principle that the density of information is bounded. This principle, that is dual to that of a finite velocity of information, has…
Following extensive numerical experiments, it has been suggested that the evolution of competing computer programs in artificial life simulations shows signs of being a self-organized critical process. The primary evidence for this claim…
We attempt to provide a comprehensive model of evolution of science across millennia taking into account the contributions of other intellectual traditions, cultural value system and increasing in sophistication of humans in their study of…
Astrobiology, the study of life as a planetary phenomenon, aims to understand the fundamental nature of life on earth and the possibility of life elsewhere. To achieve this goal, astrobiologists have initiated unprecedented communication…
How can scientists conclude with high confidence that an exoplanet hosts life? As telescopes come on line over the next 20 years that can directly observe photons from terrestrial exoplanets, this question will dictate the activities of…
Dispersal is ubiquitous throughout the tree of life: factors selecting for dispersal include kin competition, inbreeding avoidance and spatiotemporal variation in resources or habitat suitability. These factors differ in whether they…
This short paper proposes an alternative theory to Anthropic Principle. According to our interpretation, the Universe is not "fine-tuned" for life, but "roughly-tuned" for computation and its biofilness is only a phenomenon. This standpoint…