Related papers: Why Two Sexes?
Categorization is a fundamental function of minds, with wide ranging implications for the rest of the cognitive system. In humans, categories are shared and communicated between minds, thus requiring explanations at the population level. In…
Contributing to history has never been as easy as it is today. Anyone with access to the Web is able to play a part on Wikipedia, an open and free encyclopedia. Wikipedia, available in many languages, is one of the most visited websites in…
Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs,…
The discovery and characteristics of transneptunian binaries are reviewed. In the 20 years since their first discovery, a wealth of detail has emerged including the frequency of binaries in different populations, their relative sizes and…
This is a comment on a paper by S. Hod and E. Nakar, published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 238702 (2002)
Logic is one of the most male-dominated areas within the already hugely male-dominated subject of philosophy. Popular hypotheses for this disparity include a preponderance of confident, mathematically-minded male students in the classroom,…
The dialogue develops arguments for and against adopting a new world system, info-computationalist naturalism, that is poised to replace the traditional mechanistic world system. We try to figure out what the info-computational paradigm…
Wikipedia is a community-created encyclopedia that contains information about notable people from different countries, epochs and disciplines and aims to document the world's knowledge from a neutral point of view. However, the narrow…
This paper suggests that the fundamental haploid-diploid cycle of eukaryotic sex exploits a rudimentary form of the Baldwin effect. With this explanation for the basic cycle, the other associated phenomena can be explained as evolution…
In this work of speculative science, scientists from a distant star system explain the emergence and consequences of triparentalism, when three individuals are required for sexual reproduction, which is the standard form of mating on their…
While "complexity science" has achieved significant successes in several interdisciplinary fields such as economics and biology, it is only a very recent observation that legal systems -- from the way legal texts are drafted and connected…
Binary stars evolve differently from single stars, thus binary evolution is very useful for astrophysical studies. This paper discusses the application of binary evolution in the studies of stars, star clusters, galaxies, and cosmology. In…
In recent years, data science has become an indispensable part of our society. Over time, we have become reliant on this technology because of its opportunity to gain value and new insights from data in any field - business, socializing,…
In computer science, we can theoretically neatly separate transmission and processing of information, hardware and software, and programs and their inputs. This is much more intricate in biology, Nevertheless, I argue that Shannon's concept…
We consider an extension of Leo Breiman's thesis from "Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures" to include a bifurcation of algorithmic modeling, focusing on parametric regressions, interpretable algorithms, and complex (possibly…
Real-world networks typically exhibit several aspects, or layers, of interactions among their nodes. By permuting the role of the nodes and the layers, we establish a new criterion to construct the dual of a network. This approach allows to…
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…
Evolutionary game theory has been successfully used to investigate the dynamics of systems, in which many entities have competitive interactions. From a physics point of view, it is interesting to study conditions under which a coordination…
Coaxing out desired behavior from pretrained models, while avoiding undesirable ones, has redefined NLP and is reshaping how we interact with computers. What was once a scientific engineering discipline-in which building blocks are stacked…
With the explosive growth of online social media, the ancient problem of information disorders interfering with news diffusion has surfaced with a renewed intensity threatening our democracies, public health, and news outlets' credibility.…