Related papers: How bio-friendly is the universe
The fine-tuning of the universe for life, the idea that the constants of nature (or ratios between them) must belong to very small intervals in order for life to exist, has been debated by scientists for several decades. Several criticisms…
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…
Biology is data-rich, and it is equally rich in concepts and hypotheses. Part of trying to understand biological processes and systems is therefore to confront our ideas and hypotheses with data using statistical methods to determine the…
Evidence for fine-tuning of physical parameters suitable for life can perhaps be explained by almost any combination of providence, coincidence or multiverse. A multiverse usually includes parts unobservable to us, but if the theory for it…
The discipline of `theoretical biology' has been developing from its inception several decades ago almost in parallel with the advances in biology, so much so that the latter is often considered to be almost exclusively an empirical…
Chalmer's famously identified pinpointing an explanation for our subjective experience as the "hard problem of consciousness". He argued that subjective experience constitutes a "hard problem" in the sense that its explanation will…
Current evidence suggests that the cosmological constant is not zero, or that we live in an open universe. We examine the implications for the future under these assumptions, and find that they are striking. If the Universe is cosmological…
We pursue research leading towards the nature of causality in the universe. We establish the equation of the universe's evolution from the universe-state function and its series expansion, in which causes and effects connect together to…
A theory of aging based on the principles of the kinetics of chemical reactions and the rules of natural selection of organisms is proposed. The theory is based on a hypothesis that the biochemical processes in the organism can be described…
It is shown that several habitability conditions (in fact, at least seven such conditions) appear to be fulfilled automatically by circumbinary planets of main-sequence stars (CBP-MS), whereas on Earth these conditions are fulfilled only by…
Life emerged on the Earth within the first quintile of its habitable window, but a technological civilization did not blossom until its last. Efforts to infer the rate of abiogenesis, based on its early emergence, are frustrated by the…
We study the role of the information deposited in the environment of an open quantum system in course of the decoherence process. Redundant spreading of information -- the fact that some observables of the system can be independently…
Quantum science and biology now intersect in three complementary directions: quantum in biology, quantum for biology, and biology for quantum. This review provides a structured narrative evidence map of that interface rather than an…
If the results of the first LHC run are not betraying us, many decades of particle physics are culminating in a complete and consistent theory for all non-gravitational physics: the Standard Model. But despite this monumental achievement…
Speculation about the existence of advanced forms of life in the Universe and in our galaxy, has been since ever a subject of fascination and discussion in fiction, as well as in astrophysics, biology and philosophy. The well-known Fermi's…
Darwinian evolution requires (i) heritable records, (ii) repeatable copying with variation, and (iii) routine irreversibility. Categorical quantum mechanics (CQM) makes precise why ``copy'' and ``delete'' are not generic quantum operations:…
The information contained in the genome is insufficient for the control of organism development. Thus, the whereabouts of actual operational directives and workings of the genome remain obscure. In this work, it is suggested that the genome…
In this essay the ontological structure of reality is explored. The question of reducibility of biology to physics is considered in the context of their ultimate principles. It is shown that biology is an ontologically autonomous science…
We discuss the Carter's formula about the mankind evolution probability following the derivation proposed by Barrow and Tipler. We stress the relation between the existence of billions of galaxies and the evolution of at least one…
I shall present three arguments for the proposition that intelligent life is very rare in the universe. First, I shall summarize the consensus opinion of the founders of the Modern Synthesis (Simpson, Dobzhanski, and Mayr) that the…