Related papers: Immortality as a physical problem
Correlations between high life expectancy and low lifespan inequality are frequently observed. A recent article seeks to explain this phenomenon by proposing that a mortality improvement maps to life expectancy and relative lifespan…
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection does not predict long-term progress or advancement, nor does it provide a useful way to define or understand these concepts. Nevertheless, the history of life is marked by major trends that…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
The evolutionary biology of aging is fundamental to understanding the mechanisms of aging and how to develop anti-aging treatments. Thus far most evolutionary theory concerns the genetics of aging with limited physiological integration.…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
The universal concept of complexity by the dynamic redundance paradigm and the ensuing concept of extended dynamic fractality (physics/9806002) are applied here to higher levels of complexity corresponding to living systems. After recalling…
Evolvability is the capacity to evolve. This paper introduces a simple computational model of evolvability and demonstrates that, under certain conditions, evolvability can increase indefinitely, even when there is no direct selection for…
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…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
Recent discoveries show steady improvements in life expectancy during modern decades. Does this support that humans continue to live longer in future? We recently put forward the maximum survival tendency, as found in survival curves of…
An amoeba is a tree together with instructions how to iteratively grow trees by adding paths of a fixed length $\ell$. This paper analyses such a growth process. An amoeba is mortal if all versions of the process are finite, and it is…
There is overwhelming evidence that human intelligence is a product of Darwinian evolution. Investigating the consequences of self-modification, and more precisely, the consequences of utility function self-modification, leads to the…
In order to understand the phenomenon of longevity in biological world, the relationship between the potential of longevity and the structural complexity of an organism is analyzed. I. The potential of longevity is the maximum lifespan of…
Natural selection explains how life has evolved over millions of years from more primitive forms. The speed at which this happens, however, has sometimes defied formal explanations when based on random (uniformly distributed) mutations.…
In this paper we derive a statistical law of Life. It governs the probability of death, or complementary of survival, of the living organisms. We have deduced such a law coupling the widely used Weibull statistics, developed for describing…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
Weak selection, which means a phenotype is slightly advantageous over another, is an important limiting case in evolutionary biology. Recently it has been introduced into evolutionary game theory. In evolutionary game dynamics, the…
Evolution is the theory that plants and animals today have come from kinds that have existed in the past. Scientists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace dedicate their life to observe how species interact with their environment, grow,…
Machines provide a longstanding model for how organisms accumulate damage, age, and die. However, the large-scale observation and analysis of complex machine populations under real-world conditions is routinely missing from this framework.…
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…