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Existing theories for the evolution of aging and death treat senescence as a side-effect of strong selection for fertility. These theories are well-developed mathematically, but fit poorly with emerging experimental data. The data suggest…
Many socio-economic and biological processes can be modeled as systems of interacting individuals. The behaviour of such systems can be often described within game-theoretic models. In these lecture notes, we introduce fundamental concepts…
The purpose of this roadmap article is to draw attention to a paradigm shift in our understanding of evolution towards a perspective of ecological-evolutionary feedback, highlighted through two recent highly simplified examples of rapid…
Chaos is omnipresent in nature, and its understanding provides enormous social and economic benefits. However, the unpredictability of chaotic systems is a textbook concept due to their sensitivity to initial conditions, aperiodic behavior,…
The time needed to exchange information in the physical world induces a delay term when the respective system is modeled by differential equations. Time delays are hence ubiquitous, being furthermore likely to induce instabilities and with…
In this expository and resources chapter we review selected aspects of the mathematics of dynamical systems, stability, and chaos, within a historical framework that draws together two threads of its early development: celestial mechanics…
J. Willard Gibbs' Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics was the definitive work of one of America's greatest physicists. Gibbs' book on statistical mechanics establishes the basic principles and fundamental results that have…
This is an extended version of my Nobel Lecture, delivered on December $8^{th}$ 2021. I will recall the genesis of the concept of multiple equilibria in natural sciences. I will then describe my contribution to the development of this…
Evolution is a fundamental process that shapes the biological world we inhabit, and reinforcement learning is a powerful tool used in artificial intelligence to develop intelligent agents that learn from their environment. In recent years,…
In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…
The future evolution of the universe suggested by the cosmological model proposed earlier at this meeting by the authors is explored. The fundamental role played by the positive "cosmological constant" is emphasized. Dyson's 1979 paper…
Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…
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…
How cooperation emerges in human societies is both an evolutionary enigma, and a practical problem with tangible implications for societal health. Population structure has long been recognized as a catalyst for cooperation because local…
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…
Motivated by present activities in (statistical) physics directed towards biological evolution, we review the interplay of three evolutionary forces: mutation, selection, and genetic drift. The review addresses itself to physicists and…
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…
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…
We propose, in this article, an analysis of the Darwin's approach to sociality. Sociality is perfectly integrated into the selective model, and is caused by the same process as struggle for existence. Thus, the selective process does not…
`All models are wrong but some are useful' (George Box 1979). But, how to find those useful ones starting from an imperfect model? How to make informed data-driven decisions equipped with an imperfect model? These fundamental questions…