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Advances in science are being sought in newly available opportunities to collect massive quantities of data about complex systems. While key advances are being made in detailed mapping of systems, how to relate this data to solving many of…
Biological information processing manifests a huge variety in its complexity and capability among different organisms, which presumably stems from the evolutionary optimization under limited computational resources. Starting from the…
We study the discrete-time evolution of a transformation on a set of probability measures that is up-dated combining independently the marginals on the atoms of partitions. This model was recently introduced in Baake, Baake and Salamat…
As time advances in our perceived real world, existing information is preserved and new information is added to history. All the information that may ever be encoded in history must be about some fundamental, unique, atemporal and…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…
We study belief revision when information is represented by a set of probability distributions, or general information. General information extends the standard event notion while including qualitative information (A is more likely than B),…
At any moment in time, evolution is faced with a formidable challenge: refining the already highly optimised design of biological species, a feat accomplished through all preceding generations. In such a scenario, the impact of random…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
In this paper, we make a review on the concepts of rationality across several different fields, namely in economics, psychology and evolutionary biology and behavioural ecology. We review how processes like natural selection can help us…
Until recently, much of the microbial world was hidden from view. A global research effort has changed this, unveiling and quantifying microbial diversity across enormous range of critically-important contexts, from the human microbiome, to…
Recent advances in Bayesian probability theory and its application to cognitive science in combination with the development of a new generation of computational tools and methods for probabilistic computation have led to a 'probabilistic…
Selection is central to biological evolution, yet there has been no general experimental framework for quantifying selection in chemical systems before life. Here we demonstrate that selection in a prebiological chemical system can be…
Evolutionary game theory classically investigates which behavioral patterns are evolutionarily successful in a single game. More recently, a number of contributions have studied the evolution of preferences instead: which subjective…
Despite the apparent cross-disciplinary interactions among scientific fields, a formal description of their evolution is lacking. Here we describe a novel approach to study the dynamics and evolution of scientific fields using 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…
Bayesian methods since the time of Laplace have been understood by their practitioners as closely aligned to the scientific method. Indeed a recent champion of Bayesian methods, E. T. Jaynes, titled his textbook on the subject Probability…
When a prediction algorithm serves a collection of users, disparities in prediction quality are likely to emerge. If users respond to accurate predictions by increasing engagement, inviting friends, or adopting trends, repeated learning…
Statistical inference on biodiversity has a rich history going back to RA Fisher. An influential ecological theory suggests the existence of a fundamental biodiversity number, denoted $\alpha$, which coincides with the precision parameter…
Many organisms live in populations structured by space and by class, exhibit plastic responses to their social partners, and are subject to non-additive ecological and fitness effects. Social evolution theory has long recognized that all of…
The issue of whether we make decisions freely has vexed philosophers for millennia, Resolving this is vital for solving a diverse range of problems, from the physiology of how the brain makes decisions (and how we assign moral…