Related papers: Formalizing the gene centered view of evolution
The phenomenon of gene conservation is an interesting evolutionary problem related to speciation and adaptation. Conserved genes are acted upon in evolution in a way that preserves their function despite other structural and functional…
Robust generalization to new concepts has long remained a distinctive feature of human intelligence. However, recent progress in deep generative models has now led to neural architectures capable of synthesizing novel instances of unknown…
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…
Standard neutral population genetics theory with a strictly fixed population size has important limitations. An alternative model that allows independently fluctuating population sizes and reproduces the standard neutral evolution is…
The goal of Artificial Life research, as articulated by Chris Langton, is "to contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of life-as-it-could-be" (1989, p.1). The study and pursuit of…
We consider the evolution by crystalline curvature of a planar set in a stratified medium, modeled by a periodic forcing term. We characterize the limit evolution law as the period of the oscillations tends to zero. Even if the model is…
Biological systems reach organizational complexity that far exceeds the complexity of any known inanimate objects. Biological entities undoubtedly obey the laws of quantum physics and statistical mechanics. However, is modern physics…
Understanding the population structure and patterns of gene flow within species is of fundamental importance to the study of evolution. In the fields of population and evolutionary genetics, measures of genetic differentiation are commonly…
This paper outlines the implications of neural-level accounts of insight, and models of the conceptual interactions that underlie creativity, for a theory of cultural evolution. Since elements of human culture exhibit cumulative, adaptive,…
Evolutionary dynamics is often viewed as a subtle process of change accumulation that causes a divergence among organisms and their genomes. However, this interpretation is an inheritance of a gradualistic view that has been challenged at…
The evolutionary origins of structural features in reconstructed gene-regulatory networks (GRNs) remain poorly understood, especially given the random aspects of gene expression. Here, we extend a classical model of GRN evolution to allow a…
The process of evolutionary diversification unfolds in a vast genotypic space of potential outcomes. During the past century there have been remarkable advances in the development of theory for this diversification, and the theory's success…
A tendency in biological theorizing is to formulate principles above or equal to Evolution by Variation and Selection of Darwin and Wallace. In this letter I analyze one such recent proposal which did so for the developmental ascendency. I…
As researchers collect increasingly large molecular data sets to reconstruct the Tree of Life, the heterogeneity of signals in the genomes of diverse organisms poses challenges for traditional phylogenetic analysis. A class of phylogenetic…
Plasticity-led evolution is a form of evolution where a change in the environment induces novel traits via phenotypic plasticity, after which the novel traits are genetically accommodated over generations under the novel environment. This…
We give a non-technical introduction to convergence-divergence models, a new modeling approach for phylogenetic data that allows for the usual divergence of species post speciation but also allows for species to converge, i.e. become more…
The notion of concept drift refers to the phenomenon that the distribution generating the observed data changes over time. If drift is present, machine learning models can become inaccurate and need adjustment. While there do exist methods…
This research is concerned with evolution equations and their forward-backward discretizations. Our first contribution is an estimation for the distance between iterates of sequences generated by forward-backward schemes, useful in the…
It is important to be clear as to whether a theory such as evolutionary archaeology pertains to biological evolution, in which acquired change is obliterated at the end of each generation, or cultural change, in which acquired change is…
Correlation of gene histories in the human genome determines the patterns of genetic variation (haplotype structure) and is crucial to understanding genetic factors in common diseases. We derive closed analytical expressions for the…