Related papers: On the remote interaction of biological objects wi…
Heritability is a central concept in the long-standing debate about nature versus nurture in biological and social sciences. However, existing notions of heritability are based on strong assumptions and do not use explicit causal models. We…
In several domains such as linguistics, molecular biology or social sciences, holistic effects are hardly well-defined by modeling with single units, but more and more studies tend to understand macro structures with the help of meaningful…
Networks are important storage data structures now used to store personal information of individuals around the globe. With the advent of personal genome sequencing, networks are going to be used to store personal genomic sequencing of…
Random links between otherwise distant nodes can greatly facilitate the propagation of disease or information, provided contagion can be transmitted by a single active node. However we show that when the propagation requires simultaneous…
In human and animal groups, social interactions often rely on the transmission of information via visual observation of the behavior of others. These visual interactions are governed by the laws of physics and sensory limits. Individuals…
Cancer results from a sequence of genetic and epigenetic changes which lead to a variety of abnormal phenotypes including increased proliferation and survival of somatic cells, and thus, to a selective advantage of pre-cancerous cells. The…
Modern life largely transmits genetic information from mother to daughter through the duplication of single physically intact molecules that encode information. However, copying an extended molecule requires complex copying machinery and…
One of the major goals for astronomy in the next decades is the remote search for biosignatures (i.e.\ the spectroscopic evidence of biological activity) in exoplanets. Here, we adopt a Bayesian statistical framework to discuss the…
The mechanical properties of DNA play a critical role in many biological functions. For example, DNA packing in viruses involves confining the viral genome in a volume (the viral capsid) with dimensions that are comparable to the DNA…
From pathogens and computer viruses to genes and memes, contagion models have found widespread utility across the natural and social sciences. Despite their success and breadth of adoption, the approach and structure of these models remain…
Innovation is slowing greatly in the pharmaceutical sector. It is considered here how part of the problem is due to overly limiting intellectual property relations in the sector. On the other hand, computing and software in particular are…
This paper examines the effect of mimicking discontinuous heredity caused by carrying more than one chromosome in some living organisms cells in Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization algorithms. In this representation, the phenotype may…
An outstanding open problem is whether collective social phenomena occurring over short timescales can systematically reduce cultural heterogeneity in the long run, and whether offline and online human interactions contribute differently to…
It is high time to openly and without finalism define the dangerous but needed term 'purposeful information', whose quantity is an Eigen information value. Using the term 'biological information' in its stead forces one into an…
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…
Human genomic data carry unique information about an individual and offer unprecedented opportunities for healthcare. The clinical interpretations derived from large genomic datasets can greatly improve healthcare and pave the way for…
Nature (one's genes) and nurture (one's environment) jointly contribute to the formation and evolution of health and human capital over the life cycle. This complex interplay between genes and environment can be estimated and quantified…
The paper is devoted to the consequences of blind random selection of items from different item populations that might be based on completely uncorrelated factors for item inter-correlations and corresponding factor loadings. Based on the…
We have presented the basic knowledge on the structure of molecules coding the genetic information, mechanisms of transfer of this information from DNA to proteins and phenomena connected with replication of DNA. In particular, we have…
We point out an analogy between diffractive electron-nucleus scattering events, and realizations of one-dimensional branching random walks selected according to the height of the genealogical tree of the particles near their boundaries.…