Related papers: Is the Strong Anthropic Principle Too Weak?
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a…
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…
Human influence on the biosphere has been evident at least since the development of widespread agriculture, and some stratigraphers have suggested that the activities of modern civilization indicate a geological epoch transition. The study…
While modern physics and biology satisfactorily explain the passage from the Big Bang to the formation of Earth and the first cells to present-day life, respectively, the origins of biochemical life still remain an open question. Since…
If the parameters defining the physics of our universe departed from their present values, the observed rich structure and complexity would not be supported. This article considers whether similar fine-tuning of parameters applies to…
We present a theoretical as well as experimental investigation of a population of self-replicating segments of code subject to random mutation and survival of the fittest. Under the assumption that such a system constitutes a minimal system…
Evolution of life on earth was governed, primarily, by natural selection, with major contribution of other evolutionary processes, such as neutral variation, exaptation, and gene duplication. However, for biological evolution to take off, a…
The observed value $\Lambda_{\rm obs}$ of the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ is extremely smaller than theoretical expectations, and the anthropic argument has been proposed as a solution to this problem because galaxies do not form when…
The causal entropic principle has been proposed as a superior alternative to the anthropic principle for understanding the magnitude of the cosmological constant. In this approach, the probability to create observers is assumed to be…
If the human race comes to an end relatively shortly, then we have been born at a fairly typical time in history of humanity. On the other hand, if humanity lasts for much longer and trillions of people eventually exist, then we have been…
In the article I study the evolutionary adaptivity of two simple population models, based on either altruistic or egoistic law of energy exchange. The computational experiments show the convincing advantage of the altruists, which brings us…
Interpretation of empirical results based on a taxa's lifetime distribution shows apparently conflicting results. Species' lifetime is reported to be exponentially distributed, whereas higher order taxa, such as families or genera, follow a…
Earth's future detectability depends upon the trajectory of our civilization over the coming centuries. Human civilization is also the only known example of an energy-intensive civilization, so our history and future trajectories provide…
Life arose on Earth sometime in the first few hundred million years after the young planet had cooled to the point that it could support water-based organisms on its surface. The early emergence of life on Earth has been taken as evidence…
A phenomenological theory of growth of the population of humankind is proposed. The theory based on the assumption about a multifractal nature of the set of number of people in temporal axis and contains control parameters. In particular…
The Great Filter interpretation of Fermi's great silence asserts that $Npq$ is not a very large number, where $N$ is the number of potentially life-supporting planets in the observable universe, $p$ is the probability that a randomly chosen…
Although ultimately motivated by quantum theoretical considerations, Everett's many-world idea remains valid, as an approximation, in the classical limit. However to be applicable it must in any case be applied in conjunction with an…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…
We integrate dual-process theories of human cognition with evolutionary game theory to study the evolution of automatic and controlled decision-making processes. We introduce a model where agents who make decisions using either automatic or…
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…